Make It Learning

 Hello. C J here. It’s currently brutally hot outside in my hometown. There’s a strange rule that applies to authors. Whatever we write happens to us. Except it happens a day before we write the thing it’s in. My current light romance project is set in Summer around the Summermoon Summer Solstice festival in Ascala in the Legend Setting. The main character Blue has three months off work and, mild spoiler here, his first thought is to go marathon shopping. Then he gets heat stroke by the end of chapter 3-5.

He ends up fine but learns to not overtax himself. This isn’t really based on real life except that heat stroke exists, other than the fact it’s being written during a heat wave. This is how the job goes. Every time. Anyway, I had an actual point for this article. My card game Quantum is a lot of things. It’s an essay about making real life history and world spirituality relevant to the modern gaming era. It’s an invitation to explore gender and the strengths it can give us through our knowledge of it. More than anything though, it’s an educational game rooted in my desire to make a better curriculum for people of all ages.

Why don’t we learn in school where our food comes from? Why don’t we have more realistic expectations of everyone pursuing careers they like instead of having to shove the entire student body into high grade university just because it’s expensive? Could schools actually teach us what genders do and how to value yourself? No. They don’t. No one knows how to fix this, not at the institution level. So I’m going around that problem and trying to provide meaningful and engaging educational content in the form of a game where everyone’s differences become their greatest strengths.

Will we still have formal schools in 100 years? A large part of me things we will not. Especially since the people who run them seem to be really unwilling to plan for their long term needs. We the species who live on this planet need something internet based. Something decentralized. Something automated. We need to make education that includes everyone so anyone, no matter where they are from, starts off with the same advantages everyone else does. This is not hard. I make books. Books contain knowledge. Simple.

That leaves one really big gap here. Meeting new people. This is why I am pushing so hard on networking and in person meetups for this year for me and the company here I am. I’ve gotten finally some amazing traction on some of the larger furry and other groups on Facebook. It turns out the initial attempts were just not to large enough groups of people. Go big or go home seems to be the best guiding principal here. When the heat breaks I’ve got some people who want to meet and some amazing waterfront parkland to do it in here in the city. These are my thoughts.

C J Mcpherson