No Dragons Press Episode 14: “The Fabric of the Universe”

Show Notes for Episode 14

These are the show notes from No Dragons Press: Episode Fourteen: the Fabric of the Universe. (I start reading chapter 14 around 4 minutes in, if you want to skip.)

Hey everyone, thanks for listening!

Hanging with family is awesome, challenging, and mostly awesome.

So I went to a [family] wedding this past weekend and first of all, there is nothing like a good old-fashioned wedding dance party. You know, you get cousins and aunts and uncles and everybody all together drinking old fashioneds and dressed all pretty and you know what can possibly be better than that?

I have just a ton of cousins and it’s always so much fun to connect with them as adults, these people who—we all shared so much of our childhoods with each other and watched each other grow, and there’s people we remember as kids just a few years ago who are growing up into absolute gorgeous and wonderful little adults, and welcoming new boyfriends and girlfriends and seeing how they handle our good-natured but decidedly raucous brand of getting together for a family bash…

My family’s from a really small town and I live in Minneapolis now and I don’t see them a lot. So I’m seeing a lot of these people for the first time in many months, some of them maybe a year or two years, it was just really incredible. I just I love my family. I mean, I know that some people had it pretty rough at home, and I can’t say anything about that, but I think in general a lot of it is how you choose to look at the differences that come out when we get together.

I think it’s easy as adults to kind of separate ourselves from the people we used to be, but I feel like it’s just so important to, you know, check in on where you’re from every now and then. It can be really humbling to be faced with who you used to be and how people remember you and what you used to be like, but it’s also a great way to see you how far you’ve gone and where other people gone and just touch in and remember all the things you have in common or used to have in common, and most importantly remember how special and unique your little clan is in the world.

I think that’s really the best way to get a good humanizing look at whatever we each like to call the other side in this in these turbulent political times. So often we just live in an echo chamber of media and friends and there’s a lot of self-affirming stuff going on but there’s not a lot of honest looks at the other side

I think family in all its different facets is a way to put a human face on that again and really remember that most sides of any issue just is not a good against evil thing as far as general people go, and a lot of the really deep differences the media would like to like us to think we have are sometimes just tools of people who want us all distracted and pissed off at each other.

Neil deGrasse Tyson is always right

You know, there are good people and there’s bad people, and I think we all have a tendency to seek out those things that affirm what we want to think we know rather than honestly trying to learn. I Neil deGrasse Tyson earlier had a tweet that sums this up pretty well, I’ll make sure to find that and put it in the show notes.

Well, last week saw Addie finally getting a handle on herself after the complete weirdness of what she and her friends are dealing with, and this week we see her finally stepping up a little bit, which is cool.

And I’m really excited because they’re just starting to put together a plan for what to do next, which is always fun because nothing ever goes as planned, and I’m really looking forward to getting into the heart of what’s really going on here and what’s at stake.

That’s about all I’ve got in me—I hope you enjoy Episode 14, and thanks!

Thanks for listening, you guys. Hey, and if you haven’t checked out what Emily’s been doing in a while, make sure to check out our WEEKLY ILLUSTRATED FICTION SERIES over at ascraeuspress.com/nodragons. Thanks so much for listening!