A Facebook friend of mine, a woman, posted this on Facebook and at first glance it’s clever. I myself found it funny. But if a man had posted the photo and it depicted a man, would it be criticized for tolerating violence against women, possibly even advocating for it? Something to think about.
Recently I was inspired start a series of posts drawing on wisdom from Star Trek, particularly the series I grew up with, Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Although many consider TNG to be nowhere near as groundbreaking or topical as the original series, I find it rife with life lessons that are timeless and speak to the human condition. Many of these helped me grapple with young adulthood and the solitude of being unpopular in high school.
The point of this blog series is not to highlight the better-known quotes from either series, but to focus on those buried a little deeper within an episode. There is no set schedule as my paying client work comes first, but hopefully I will manage two per month.
Rather than post the second in the series here, however, I’ve opted to post it to an up and coming site called Medium. After blogging about my impressions of the site and its content, I received an invitation to contribute, so click here for “The Painful Art of Accepting Life’s Stalemates” on Medium; the first installment, “Variations on a Program: You Can’t Go Back” can be found here.
Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.
Because there’s not enough places for people to be published without getting paid, we now have Medium, “a better place to read and write things that matter.”
Medium has been on my radar for a while thanks to the occasional mention in my Twitter feed, but it was only recently that I visited the site to read an article written by an industry peer.
I really enjoyed what she wrote because it was personal and original, but otherwise I wonder how Medium is different or better than any other online platform. After perusing some recent Editor’s Picks, I can’t say the content is any more compelling than what I’ve read on other digital-first / digital-only media outlets or on traditional, main stream media sites. Much of it reminds me of the link bait I come across on Twitter.
Contributing content to Medium is limited right now, even if you do register. What the criteria is for being allowed to publish on the site is a mystery to me; it’s certainly not quality of writing because with rare exception, of the 10 articles I read, most were either self-indulgent, pointless ramblings or poorly written grammatically and structurally. Overall they lacked depth.
I also encountered the same voices from elsewhere. I’m not sure why Facebook’s product design director needs another platform to post a profanity-laced and ultimately empty rant about design. I don’t want to read another blog by Jeff Jarvis. He gets enough attention already. And I definitely don’t need yet another blog post by a self-described entrepreneur giving advice about growing a startup.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy any articles because I did find one or two, but even those were on topics or concepts I’d read about plenty of times before and these just provided someone’s personal perspective, not new knowledge. One could argue that’s valuable in and of itself, but to me it represents a larger frustration I have with online content: for every one real article that delves into something in a meaningful manner there’s at least a dozen articles or blog posts that have summarized it or “curated” it. I suppose that’s better than an opinionated blog masquerading as a news article by a writer who thinks linking out to other articles is an adequate substitute for picking up the phone and interviewing a source.
What also struck me about Medium is that I’m not sure who the target audience is. “A better place to read and write things that matter” is nebulous and ultimately meaningless. When I was in journalism school we were always reminded by professors to remember who the audience was when pitching and writing stories for the student newspaper. That rule has stayed with me to this day. Who is supposed to be reading Medium? Entrepreneurs? Artists? Application developers? I have no idea and I’m unclear if I should be taking the time to browse through it.
Online content is a lot like cable TV, which I recently cancelled: there’s hundreds of channels but nothing on, and Medium strikes me as just one more place that adds to the noise I have to “channel surf” through to find the occasional gem. Unless it really defines what it is, and soon, Medium could easily find itself the flavour of the month in a sea of online soapboxes.
Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.
Serial killers have always been popular fodder for books and movies, but they are especially popular on television right now: Kevin Bacon is part of the most inept team of FBI agents trying to catch not only a serial killer but his followers on The Following, while Dexter scratches his psychotic itch by only killing the bad guys. Meanwhile, the Criminal Minds team pursues serial killers, complete with lifeless, stilted dialogue, but after eight seasons, even it has yet to encounter TV’s most prolific serial killer: Jessica Fletcher.
Over the course of 12 seasons and more than 250 episodes, the acclaimed mystery author left a trail of corpses in her wake, frequently pulling nieces and nephews into her vortex of murder and mayhem.
Most people would be traumatized by weekly encounters with grisly death, but not Jessica. She took it in stride, whether she encountered it traveling across country to a dear friend’s funeral or in her quiet, quaint hometown in Maine. She was seemingly oblivious to Cabot Cove’s rising policing costs or plunging housing prices courtesy of her handiwork, which also resulted in one of the worst murder rates in America, perhaps the entire world. Nearly 8% of the town’s population was killed over the course a decade, not including visitors.
Poor Sheriff Tupper often thought he was close to finding out who the true killer was until Jessica set him straight as she covered her own tracks, but he must have suspected her involvement in the town’s high body count because he ultimately faked his own retirement and reinvented himself as a priest who solved crime.
It’s doubtful that Jessica was always a blood-thirsty murderer, and it’s even money whether or not she was responsible for the death of her husband Frank. It’s more likely that after the unexpected success of her first mystery novel, Jessica got writer’s block and felt the only way to overcome it was to pull off a clever murder. It was a slippery slope from there.
Jessica probably had help too, in the same way that Red John has minions on The Mentalist. She also had no qualms about setting someone up to take the fall for her cold-hearted killing. During the early days of her rampage, one of her nieces was tricked into a confession. And then there is Jessica’s nephew Grady.
Poor Grady. He helps his aunt Jess get her book published and nearly goes to prison when she commits her first murder. He is fortunate enough to survive her decade-long killing spree and even successfully fights a battle with the Borg centuries later.
But that was just the beginning of Jessica’s reign of terror, and presumably she’s still out there. Even more frightening is that there is a whole generation of people who have no idea who she is. They will be oblivious to the danger they are in simply by staying in the same hotel while she’s on a book tour, or thinking it would be a relaxing afternoon diversion to stop in the unremarkable but charming town of Cabot Cove, Maine.
Only one person can put an end to stop Jessica Fletcher from fueling her muse with murder: Richard Castle.
That’s right, Richard Castle, author of the acclaimed Derek Storm and Nikki Heat novels, is uniquely equipped to understand Jessica’s twisted mind and reveal her true nature.
Why? Because there are two kinds of folks who sit around all day thinking about killing people: mystery writers and serial killers.
Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.
“She’s gone. I tried variations of the program; others appeared, but not Minuet.”
“Maybe it was all part of the Bynars’ programming. But you know, Number One, some relationships just can’t work.”
“Yes, probably true. She’ll be difficult to forget.”
Will Riker has one of life’s rare yet perfect experiences in the form of a computer-generated lady who charms him with her beauty, intelligence and love of jazz in the ST:TNG first season episode “11001001”. Ultimately, the moment proves fleeting as Minuet is nothing more than a distraction created by an alien race to occupy Riker until they needed his help aboard an abandoned Enterprise. Once the crisis is averted, the specially-created holodeck program is no longer exactly the same despite Riker’s efforts to bring it back.
Minuet is gone; the moment is gone.
We all have these moments: a confluence of great people, events and shared experiences. They can last only a few hours, a day, months or years. It might be your first love, your first day at university or your first adventure abroad. If you’re fortunate, you have these moments in your career where a supportive boss, talented colleagues and appreciative customers are bundled together to create a rewarding and even exhilarating workplace.
When these experiences end we mourn them; we grieve them as we would a lost loved one. When they end abruptly, it’s jarring. Even when you’re prepared for the closure of one chapter, the mourning period that follows can last for what feels like an eternity.
Not long ago I had moment that I’d thought – and hoped – would last for a long time, if not forever. Ultimately it lasted less than a year and ever since, I’ve sought variations of the program; I’ve hoped and tried to recapture the fun and the camaraderie of those months, and hoped to maintain a connection to one particular person whose impact on my life caught me completely by surprise. I had some amazing adventures with her; she brought out the best in me when many other things in my life weren’t going right.
But one day, just like Minuet, she was gone. She was difficult to forget, but I managed. Rather than being sad when her visage danced into my mind, I recalled the exhilarating experiences I had with her, truly some of the most joyous moments of my life.
“Don’t look back unless you are going that way,” said Henry David Thoreau. And even if you try to go back, the footprints fade and often disappear altogether. You wind up in a similar place, but it’s not quite the same, and you ultimately drive yourself mad making comparisons.
Not long after coming to terms with this unexpected and unwanted ending, I was presented with a variation of the program. My Minuet resurfaced, albeit in a different setting. It was an unexpected but welcome surprise.
But it was short-lived, and I’ve been a little miffed at the Universe ever since. I’ve considered suppressing memories related to the program, but if I’m honest with myself I would not trade those experiences for anything. I am grateful she was in my life if only for short time.
One day soon I hope to no longer yearn for a variation of the program. No promises though; she will be difficult to forget.
Gary Hilson is a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and content strategist storyteller.
Research shows that smell can be a powerful trigger for memory, so much in fact that some retailers are using scents to draw people into their stores, while real estate agents lay out fresh baked goods in kitchens to make a house feel like a home to prospective buyers.
Sitting in my home office with the balcony door open means not only do I hear the lawnmower cutting the grass for the first time this year, but I can smell the clippings. That smell reminds me of summer, particularly the summers of my youth, growing up in rural area on a three-acre hobby farm. As I got older, cutting the grass almost weekly became my responsibility. It wasn’t all that much of a chore because I got to drive a riding mower.
There are so many smells I associate with summers growing up in the country. Some of them make sense, some are a little odd:
Gasoline: Before getting on that riding lawn mower I had to fill it up with gas from a gas can using a funnel. Don’t get any funny ideas; it’s not as though I paused and savored the smell. By the end of high school I was getting my daily gas fume fix as a gas jockey at a gas station next to a chip wagon, which leads me to my next scent….
French Fries: Specifically, the smell of a deep fryer. I spent two summers working in hot chip wagons and later, as a gas jockey, I enjoyed the smell of petrol mingled with the sweet aroma of fries from the chip wagon next door, which was only open in the summer, I might add.
Lilac: Grade school usually wrapped up the third week of June, and my mom liked to put us to work to keep us busy. One of my regular jobs as I got taller was to hang laundry on the line. We had a clothesline that stretched between the garage and one of our barns. Nestled right next to the garage was a large lilac bush; it usually blooming by that time of year. Since then the smell of lilac not only brings back memories of summer, but of freedom from real responsibility and the stress of school.
Fresh Laundry: Further to the above, even when I’m pulling my laundry out of a washer to place in the dryer in my apartment’s laundry room, I still think of summers and hanging wet clothes on a line.
BBQ: Whether it’s coal-fired or propane-powered, the smell of meat grilling brings back memories of summer. In this I’m hardly unique. That being said, my parents would cook on the barbeque well into November as long there was propane left.
Cow Manure: I grew up next to a dairy farm. By the end of the summer the corn in the surrounding fields was all harvested and it was time to fertilize those empty fields naturally. Hence, cow shit reminds me of summer.
Beets Boiling: Not that I smell this often, but as a kid we had a fairly sizable garden and there was always one weekend afternoon when it was time to boil beets for pickling. I hated the smell, but I love the taste of pickled beets. Just don’t eat a whole jar in one sitting or you’ll pee red, freak out and drive yourself to the emergency room.
Bark Chips: My first summer as a gardener I went through a lot of bark chips – bags and bags of bark chips. When you first pour them out the smell is particularly strong but fades the longer the chips have been out. Bark chips are to summer what pine needles are to Christmas.
Fresh Pavement: Before my family moved out to live in rural Ontario when I was five, we lived in the suburb of Ottawa known as Hunt Club, which at the time was quite new. I vividly recall the smell of fresh pavement during the scorching summer. Now living in the big city of Toronto, I naturally associate summer with roadwork and inconvenience.
What smells tell you summer is here?
Gary Hilson is a writer, editor and digital media specialist for hire. He lives in Toronto.