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Episode 33: Urza's Rummage-Sale Rube Goldberg Machine
120 Plays6 years ago
Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In our thirty-third episode, your friendly neighborhood gob-slugs try to get inside the mind of the "mad artificer" himself, Urza Planeswalker, as they discuss the elements of chance and planning that went into the device that saved Dominaria – the Legacy.
In conversation with this, Alex and Joe talk through their own ways of planning (or not) and how they have learned to deal well with the unexpected (or not).
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We have launched our new Patreon! You can join currently at the $1 "Goblin Bangchuckers" tier, which gets you access to our private Discord server where you can talk all things lore, life, and love with other goofy gobbos like yourself. Additional rewards and tiers will continue to be added, too!
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Joe Redemann at @Fyndhorn, Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @AlexanderNewm. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
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Transcript
Introduction and Podcast Updates
00:00:07
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. In this episode we talk about the legacy, the artifact collection created by Urza, and how that relates to planning and improvisation in one's life.
00:00:25
Speaker
I just wanted to take this moment to acknowledge the fact that the War of the Spark previews are coming out right now, and we've seen already the first day of previews, but the cast of the Goblin Lore are waiting a little bit before we put anything out in depth to the cards as it relates to the story of this set.
00:00:50
Speaker
We appreciate you being patient with us and knowing that we are watching things, we're just not the kind of podcast that usually does the rapid reaction type of content.
Legacy Weapon and Urza's Artifacts
00:01:06
Speaker
My last piece of business before we get to the show is to thank our newest Patreon backer, and that is ClayB at MTG underscore Clay B-E-E. Thank you so much.
00:01:21
Speaker
Now, without any further ado, let's get to the show.
00:01:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of Goblin Lore. This episode we are talking about the legacy weapon and whether or not Urza actually planned all of the madness that happened in the run up to the Phrexian invasion of Dominaria. But before we get to it, I am going to ask my co-host to introduce himself.
00:01:52
Speaker
And I also have a burning inquiry for him, and that is, what random object that you own would likely fit into a machine that you'd use to save the world? Well, I'm Alex, phoned on Twitter at Alexander New M. And, you know, maybe appropriate to this, the particular topic of this episode.
00:02:18
Speaker
thinking about what type of machine, you know, if we're talking about the ridiculous Rube Goldberg type machine that Ursa appeared to have built, I think just about any random object I own would probably fit in the legacy because that seemed to be his plan. Like don't clean out your apartment, just shove it all on a sky ship and call it the legacy. So on that note, I'm going to go with the closest object to hand.
00:02:42
Speaker
this nice granite bookend that I got. Did you literally just reach out and pull something off your shelf? Yes, I
Humor and Personal Object Machine
00:02:50
Speaker
did. Oh my gosh. Actually, there's a pair of them because I work in a financial company. On them, they have one has a bull and one has a bear because we're clever. Really, they're just gorgeous and heavy. I figure a nice probably five pound granite bookend
00:03:09
Speaker
That'd be a good counterweight. I don't know what weight we're going to be countering, but building a trebuchet or something, this will work. I don't know. Yeah, it'll be the thing that drops into a bucket when the candle fire burns through the string that's holding it up. And that button will project the, yeah, it's physics. I got string, I got candles, I got some physics, not a lot.
00:03:38
Speaker
but probably enough to build this thing. See? This is like magic MacGyver. Yes.
00:03:46
Speaker
Well, while I try to cobble together some sort of device using that bookend, I will introduce myself as Jar Redemann. You can find me on Twitter, at Findhorn, that's F-Y-N-D, Horn. Aw, my cat is staring at me right now. He's just curled up on the ground and just looking at me with such adorable gorgeous eyes, and he's the closest thing with an arm reach to me.
00:04:12
Speaker
I might say Cat. His name is Cat, by the way. I might say Cat would be my object that I would use in the machine to save the world. I do think parts of the legacy weapon, the legacy at least, were pretty personal, pretty emotional, and there were some living beings involved in the legacy which we'll talk about shortly.
00:04:38
Speaker
So I might say Cat would be my nominee for joining our Save the World crew here. No, that's perfect, because Cat can push my bookend off the table. Oh, sure. And then it can fall into whatever Hobbs has that he's not here to share. And then question marks. And then profit. Oh, yeah, profit. Sorry. Hopefully maybe profit after Save the World, because if we don't save the world first, then yikes.
00:05:07
Speaker
Yup, see? That's how we do it here, Goblin Law. We eventually get there. Just throw words at it till we figure it out. So much planning involved. As is the goblin way. Well, goblins don't use words so much as like expulsions and things that are sharp, but we like to use words here. We try our best. We take that goblin philosophy and we adapt it to a slightly more socially acceptable method.
00:05:36
Speaker
Goblin lore is a good card. It's a fun card to use. I'm not sure what I think of goblin philosophy. That one might be a bit tough to use. But that said, we're already off topic, off the rails, much like the planning sessions that must have gone into Urza putting together the legacy weapon. So why don't we go right into that? You could say by being off the rails, we are still on topic.
Deep Dive into Legacy Weapon Artifacts
00:06:07
Speaker
So that gets us kind of into our lore section of this episode where we are going to talk about the legacy weapon and Ursa's master plan to destroy Phryxia and its overlord Yawgmoth. There is the legacy, which is the whole collection of objects and people and such. But then there is also the legacy weapon, which is the culmination of it, kind of the completion of
00:06:36
Speaker
the legacy then that's what was used to defeat Yawgmoth finally after multiple other things failed during the invasion cycle in the in the story of the set of apocalypse.
00:06:49
Speaker
And the legacy is essentially just a random collection of artifacts, of magical artifacts and tools and items collected across the multiverse that
00:07:06
Speaker
turned into the thing that actually finally did in Yawgmoth and Phyrexia and stopped the invasion in its tracks. And I think, Alex, what was the term that you used it when we were doing planning off-air? I think this might have been weeks or months ago that you used it. Oh. When we were talking about Urza and I said it was Hoarder's Dominaria edition. There you go. Yeah, meets the Bene Gesserit.
00:07:34
Speaker
Yeah, the vintage other from Dune, yep. Yeah, it's Hoarders Dominaria edition slash, well, I think you also at one point called it Urza's Nonsense Yard Sale. Yes, it was all this stuff he put out at the yard sale, but he couldn't sell, so he just stuck it in a box. It's all the leftovers.
00:07:55
Speaker
Oh man, and it's just crazy stuff. And we'll get to some of these things in a second, but not by name here, I'm just gonna throw out, there were ancient engines, ancient forges, magical books, there were, gosh, there were... Conventional artifacts, you know, artifacts of power that did
00:08:23
Speaker
different things, just really disparate uses. But for some reason, you put them together. I think an interesting thing to look at too is the art. There's two arts for legacy equipment. And the 10th edition art is just a bunch of the things. Yeah, it's just a picture of this, you know, garage sale that no one showed up to.
00:08:47
Speaker
It's almost like an archaeology dig and somebody laid out all of the all of these things like going okay This is we've you know categorized all of the items that led to this event happening Yes, but it's no connection. None of these things matter to the other other than altogether Yeah, the ersa put them in the same collection
00:09:11
Speaker
Our favorite, I will say, for both of us is the original Apocalypse edition. That one is very cool. Which, why don't we just get to right now, actually? This is my questionable one here, is the No Moon, which was created by the Thrawn back in the day and was essentially a space station?
00:09:33
Speaker
that sort of would turn artifacts in its range off. It would deactivate them and it was part of the Thrawn's defenses against the Augments invading army way back in the day. It was also part of the control center for their artifact forces. It's been a little while, but the Thrawn is a book I actually have read.
00:10:03
Speaker
There's a few books along the sequence that I didn't read, but The Throne, so that, the book is literally called The Throne, and it's about the Throne Empire and sort of Yawgmoth. They last days when Yawgmoth shows up and turns into a war, and the no moon was used to help control their artifacts that were, you know, their armies slash guards slash security forces. And Yawgmoth's forces almost took it over.
00:10:31
Speaker
which would have been able to basically turn almost their entire army against themselves, and that would have just ended the war. Yawgmoth would have just taken over the Thrawn Empire. But somebody was able to – they weren't able to take it back, but they were able to –
00:10:52
Speaker
get it to go away.
00:11:07
Speaker
Um, because of this war and because of plagues and all this stuff, um, much like other Thrawn artifacts, people just saw this second moon in the sky and were kind of like, oh, that's weird. Why is that up there? That's a weird thing. We've got two moons and that one doesn't look like a normal moon, but oh well, whatever. So they call it the null moon. Um.
00:11:25
Speaker
And it was also a large battery of white manna back before the invasion and apocalypse. And as part of the desperation attempt to destroy Yawgmoth, when Yawgmoth took physical form and entered Dominaria again,
00:11:49
Speaker
um the weather light punched through the null moon spraying this all of this hugely over thousands of years collected beam of white mana into Yawgmoth and it like you know it was kind of like sunlight on a vampire it like burned him but it didn't kill him and so like you know this it stunted it it's it stopped him for a little bit but
00:12:13
Speaker
I proposed to you, Alex, that the null moon is sort of part of the legacy? You know, in the way we've described the legacy as random objects that Urza found laying around that happen to prove useful, it 100% hits those criteria. You are accurate. You're correct there.
00:12:34
Speaker
And I think that's where I get it. It isn't a handheldable item that you can sort of put into a collection like the others, but I do think that it played a part in this thing. I don't remember now from the story, and apologies to our listeners who are probably shouting in their cars going, I know what happened in Apocalypse.
00:13:01
Speaker
I believe that part of the white manna did filter into the event that we'll describe in a minute. I think that was part of it. I don't know. No, I think you're right. When we were talking beforehand, I was a little skeptical. I'm like, well, I don't know that it actually counted because I'm thinking the items that Ursa
00:13:20
Speaker
personally picked up off the ground because he found them on the beach and they looked, you know, gorgeous. And so he picked it up and put it in his pocket. Those are the items I'm thinking of as the legacy. Um, but no, yeah, the, the, the, the no moon really does kind of fit that. We're just grabbing what we have. And using it in any way possible and using it anyway. Yeah. And like you too, I've read the books, but I haven't read the invasion cycle since high school. It's been a while.
00:13:50
Speaker
Well, why don't we go from a null moon to a null rod? This is one that you wanted to talk about. Yes. Well, mostly because of the flavor text. You know, listeners who have been listening to our cast for a while know that we love flavor text. I believe null rod comes up in the story and I haven't finished reading Wrath and Storm, which is the main sort of weather light saga book that
00:14:19
Speaker
encompasses what like mirage through the end of the wrath cycle. So what's that stronghold? So like five sets or something of story. I believe it shows up. Yes, you're right. Stronghold was the middle one of that block. And I pretty sure no rub was brought up somewhere in there. But I can't remember more than that. But it's fun because it is a artifact with the ability activated abilities of artifacts can't be activated.
00:14:50
Speaker
straightforward sentence. Yeah, it has a lot of ramifications. But the flavor text is amazing. So the flavor text is Gerard, but it doesn't do anything. Hannah, who was the ship's engineer and managed the artifacts, her response is, No, it does nothing. Which is just the perfect. I'd love that because it works on a few levels. Like, no, it doesn't. It does something. And the something that it does,
00:15:19
Speaker
is nothing. I love that word play. It is beautiful in that. I love it. And it's like played in Legacy or something. I don't know anything about that. Vintage? I don't know. Vintage maybe? It's in Vintage Masters. I play vintage artist. Yeah. I don't know that Ansematic's deck would be running no rot. There you go. I might be wrong. Maybe it would.
00:15:45
Speaker
Um, I especially want to talk here about the bones of Ramos. This is another part of the legacy that I'm particularly interested in. Um, mostly because, um, I talked about it in episode 16, which is our first goblin game episode, actually.
00:16:02
Speaker
It's where we talked about Mercadia and personality types. I talked a little bit about the origin myth of Mercadia and the various civilizations and how they all believed that they stemmed from a different part of this dragon, Ramos, and each of his
00:16:25
Speaker
you know, body parts sort of that were, you know, emitted from him as he saved them from this far off plane and took them to, you know, Mercadia. I won't get into all of that. Go listen to Episode 16 if you do want to check all that out. But these were the Power Stones in the Dragon Engine, Ramos, who saved all of these various peoples
00:16:50
Speaker
from the Sylex explosion that we mentioned before during the Brothers' War on Dominaria. So it's kind of a cool thing because there is this hallowed identity of these power stones, but also I like that not only were the might stone and weak stone crucial to the legacy weapon going off,
00:17:17
Speaker
You also had the these five other power stones So like it does kind of have to me even though obviously power stones are a fantasy concept There's a lot of energy being you know used in this in this weapon in this item and so it does have this element of Kind of a realistic idea of a nuclear weapon going off. There's a lot of
00:17:44
Speaker
energy used in these world-changing weapons in real life. I think there's something compelling about the fact that these five very believed and very revered items are put into this grand Rube Goldberg machine to help power it. Some interesting about the energy coming from those two is the five power stones are one of each color.
00:18:15
Speaker
So that kind of puts that it's not just these colorless artifacts that are part of this legacy. There is this combination of all five colors of mana going into building this machine as well. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah, absolutely. So segueing very poorly off of the bones of Ramos, I want to talk about the juju bubble.
Artifact Reviews and Thematic Connections
00:18:40
Speaker
which I positive, if you are familiar with the legacy, is not what you were expecting me to say. I don't know anything about it from a story standpoint. This is a card from Visions, which was a set from Mirage, which further goes to my point that it seems like these were just artifacts that he found on the ground and decided to put together.
00:19:00
Speaker
If I remember right, Orem, the Samite healer, on the crew of the Weatherlight, I believe Orem brought this, but I don't remember how or where or when this showed up. Yeah, and that makes sense too. I mean, and like Gerard was raised by Siddharth Kondo, who lived, I mean, he ended up coming out later as a card.
00:19:27
Speaker
Much later, but he was he was living in the regions of that the Mirage story took place in and so it kind of makes sense that some artifacts from that locale kind of get brought in. But the juju bubble. I just need to describe as a card like it is a colorless. It is an artifact for one colorless.
00:19:48
Speaker
with a cumulative upkeep of one. Furthermore. Great mechanic. Oh, just excellent. Great value. You get to just keep paying more and more every turn. If you play a card, bury Juju Bubble. Because, you know, it's just that powerful. And the rest of the text is to gain one life. So this card, for some reason, was like
00:20:16
Speaker
this super Johnny puzzle. I mean, that just super appealed to me when I was, well, rather young because I was playing magic when this card came out. And I was young. And so for some reason, I thought that I wanted to try to build a deck with this card. I'll tell you, I never actually did. I never had the patience to try to build one. And I think if I had, I'd have figured out that probably wasn't a good idea. But
00:20:42
Speaker
For some reason, the idea of just pouring endless mana into gaining single points of life and then eventually a cumulative upkeep that I'd end up not being able to pay just sounded like so much that I could get out of this one card. As long as I've been playing magic, I've always had like a little stack where I just kind of keep cards I think are cool and things that I kind of want to build. And so when I'm looking for inspiration, I'll kind of flip through there.
00:21:12
Speaker
the day I cracked in a pack was sitting in that stack of cards when I was a kid and up until I sold my collection. Yeah, I didn't understand that cumulative upkeep meant you pay more every turn as a kid, so I definitely ran this card. And in our casual at lunchtime groups, I definitely hosed these people, these other kids around me because
00:21:39
Speaker
I didn't understand what the word cumulative meant. So there we have it. It only took me, what, 18 years to admit that? So there it is. Whoops. Last but certainly not least, the other piece of the legacy weapon. And this is certainly not the last piece of the legacy weapon that exists. We'll link to the MTG Wiki article in the show notes here. But the last one that we want to touch on
00:22:08
Speaker
is the Salvation Sphere, better known as Squeeze Toy. And Squeeze, the patron saint of this podcast, is, you know, the glorious goblin deckhand of the Weatherlight crew and, you know, immortal and amazing and wonderful. But the reason that Squeeze is immortal is because of the Salvation Sphere.
00:22:31
Speaker
So the Squeeze toy, as it were, which is also one of the better puns in Magic Lore, is this artifact that I, again, fuzzy remembering of the Wrath and Storm Cycle. It was an artifact that was created or just given to Squeeze by, I believe, Yawgmoth.
00:22:57
Speaker
for the purpose of keeping him alive whenever Crovax, who was a former member of the Weatherlight crew, then Evan Carr, or, you know, leader, president, dictator of RAF, uh, so that Crovax could kill Squee repeatedly for his enjoyment, and Squee would come back to life, and then Crovax could kill him again. And...
00:23:22
Speaker
The sad thing about this, other than, you know, Squee dying repeatedly, who is just the most wonderful, lovable character in all of Magic history, is that they didn't realize that they made Squee immortal. And Squee is not like the most powerful character in Magic history, and especially not in the Weatherlight saga.
00:23:45
Speaker
But he still found a way to mess stuff up for them just simply by the fact of being around and being able to stay around all the time. And I absolutely love that. I believe I've said it before on this podcast that Squeeze Superpower is being underestimated. And because they just assume, you know, Yakmoth or whomever
00:24:12
Speaker
Just assumes that Squee is this bumbling goblin who's not gonna be able to do anything useful. And they take their eyes off him. And, you know, he's not gonna lead armies. He's not gonna cast powerful spells and do things. But he can bumble so well. Better than anyone else. And he will bumble. And best darn bumbler. Straight through breaking a bunch of things that you needed for your plans. And then all of a sudden, you're left without whatever it was he broke. And what are you gonna do? You can't kill him.
00:24:41
Speaker
Absolutely. Best darn good boy bumbler in the multiverse. Yeah. That's what I've always said. Well, and so this seems as good a time as any to take us from this collection of complete trash. Things that have their own purpose sort of in a very specific context. But in a vacuum are completely worthless items.
00:25:09
Speaker
It seems like a good time, as good a time as any, to take us to our natural connection, which is our real world topic, and just talk about, did there is a plan any of this? Or did he get lucky? Yes, and yes. I think the putting a cheery, trying to put that silver lining in the storm cloud,
00:25:39
Speaker
whole thing is that what Urza showed, or kind of what he did, he didn't have to have a master plan knowing everything all along. He just had to put enough things together and eventually something would work. And, you know, to bring that into actual real world context, you hear that a lot from writers, people who are trying to make it as a professional writer that
00:26:07
Speaker
you never exactly know which thing you wrote will be the first thing you sell. So you just write stuff, you get it as good as you can, and then you send it out. And you send it out. And if no one buys this thing, well, that's great. You have the second thing being sent out. And you just kind of go until something works. And I think that's what Urza did. I can't remember where, but I can't remember who. At my work, they will, every year, they do some big
00:26:35
Speaker
employee thing. And so they, for our employee of the year awards and all this stuff, and so I was bringing a speaker. And one year, this guy was talking about, you know, how success, you know, successful people, what what luck is, and how someone gets to be lucky to be successful. And basically, his thing is, is like, luck isn't, this person is more lucky than someone else. It's that luck, that this person positions themselves to take advantage of opportunities that came about.
00:27:05
Speaker
And there are different ways and especially with privilege and things where you will have more opportunities. But ultimately, the luck factor is positioning yourself to take advantage of those opportunities when they show up. And I think that's how Urza got lucky. He created so many random things and weird stuff and powerful things that eventually one of them just worked. He positioned himself to take advantage of different situations, sometimes in
00:27:32
Speaker
morally reprehensible ways, but we will talk about that later. That's a different episode entirely. That is a different episode, but I think that is how he was lucky was he positioned himself to just grab a hold of any opportunity he had.
Strategic Planning and Lessons
00:27:46
Speaker
Like you're saying, that reminds me of a book by Malcolm Gladwell called Outliers, which I don't know if you've read, but essentially it's the idea that the successful people in life are not lucky, they didn't just
00:28:07
Speaker
hit the lottery, and it's not that they just pulled themselves up by the bootstraps either. It was a mix of both, but the most successful people in life grabbed an opportunity and moved forward with it. And yes, there is a lot, like you said, there's a lot of privilege that sets people up for that. There are
00:28:28
Speaker
random social structures that we have in place that sets people up for those bits of success or larger random chances of success. For instance, I think the best example is Bill Gates and how he came to be this multi-millionaire billionaire now in charge of Microsoft and his start was
00:28:53
Speaker
you know, so, so innocuous. It was just, you know, as simple as he started taking classes at his local University of Washington. I believe he had some sort of, you know, high school program in Washington, in Seattle. And so he was there on campus. He found out that there was a computer lab back in the 70s when computers were not really a thing anywhere.
00:29:20
Speaker
but Washington had a computer lab and so he would go and reserve time and set up like, okay, I'm gonna take an hour and learn how to do basic coding. But then he found out that the computers that they could rent out had a bug that could be exploited so where you wouldn't have to punch in for only an hour, you could hack yourself unlimited time
00:29:50
Speaker
to code on the computer and so it wouldn't set up an alarm in the library and go, hey, get out of there. He would just sit in there for hours and hours and hours on end and teach himself coding and build himself programs. And so he found all these ways to
00:30:08
Speaker
sees and capitalize on this random happenstance, but he did have the wherewithal to say, this is a path to something that I want to do. I am going to devote the time to building this plan up. Yeah.
00:30:24
Speaker
So I guess I want to ask you, an even more pared down nuts and bolts thing for your own life, how far do you feel does planning get you in assuring your own outcomes in life?
00:30:46
Speaker
I tend to find for myself, I've much more been a sort of fly by the seat of your pants person, honestly. I think this is why I naturally identify with red in the magic color pie is I really enjoy sort of just riding the wave and dealing with the chaos as it comes. But I'm curious about what you sort of ascribe to and how that plan goes or how the plan doesn't go for you.
00:31:17
Speaker
That is kind of a weird and complicated question. We'll see how this answer goes. The short intro version is that I didn't plan for a long time, not because I was more fly by the seat of my pants and more because of my undiagnosed anxiety at the time. I was basically just coasting on what I had. I had a job and I had, you know, so I just coasted through and didn't really plan things.
00:31:47
Speaker
there was other things going on basically, but ultimately I wasn't planning ahead. I wasn't trying to see how to go anywhere. I didn't have goals and aspirations. The last few years I've been trying to figure out how to do that. It feels like I spent a large chunk of especially my 20s not really doing things like trying to be as
00:32:18
Speaker
low impact on the world and people around me as I could. And now I'm kind of learning how to do the things that I think people spent some time in that age range doing. And so for me, like planning now, I'm not, I don't have any big, large plans, but I'm starting to do plans on smaller scales for all sorts of things, because it's just a function of my personality where there's a lot of, I have a lot of structure on one side, but that side can't really accomplish anything because it doesn't have passion or drive.
00:32:48
Speaker
And then I have the passion of the drive on the other side, but I can't really accomplish anything because it doesn't have structure to get it done. And that's why I feel very like Izzity, or perhaps maybe Jeskai, because the structure is not necessarily blue, maybe blue white, or red white, or somewhere in there is, I think, my personality.
00:33:13
Speaker
my color pie. So I'm trying like every year now I do so for a while I would do like, you know, New Year's resolutions. New Year's resolutions as people talk about them particularly at least in our culture in America tend not to work because people will set I want to lose x weight, I want to do something big, but they don't have steps to get there. And then within a week or two, they start to fail what they think they should be accomplishing.
00:33:41
Speaker
And then they decide that the year is over, they can't accomplish this because they're however far and maybe it's a month, maybe it's two months. But they're however far in, they're off the trail, they they it's not even worth it, I'll just stop. And you don't do it. And then you know, I had the whole, well, if I'm going to do a thing, I shouldn't wait to the first year, that's you know, I should just do it. And then of course, I just never do it. Because the truth is sometimes having
00:34:08
Speaker
A particular day to say we're going to start here, having a day to kind of build a plan around just gets you started. But sometimes people put too much faith in that or too much reliance on that. And when you don't get started or you do and you don't succeed very early. Anyway, what I'm getting to is I started with that, but then I sort of built into this thing where
00:34:29
Speaker
every year I sit down and inspired by Mark Rosewater who does the state of design inspired by the State of the Union address that the president does every year. I will sit down and kind of assess where I think I am and what I want to do over the next year. I usually start working on that right around the end of December into the first couple months of the year and that has given me
00:34:55
Speaker
A, it's given me a way to do some journaling, which is a thing I've never done because I have a good memory, but not a really good memory. Good enough that I'm like, well, I don't have to write this down. I'll remember things, but not good enough that five years later, I've forgotten things. This gives me a good way to be able to check back in every year. Where was I at this time? What was I thinking about? What was I planning? What was I worrying about? What had I been doing? But it also gives me
00:35:23
Speaker
means to plan. It gives me a means to say I want to aim to hit this goal, be it in my job, be it financially, be it even in my hobbies, my relationships with friends and family. I kind of have six different categories and I go through all of that. A lot of creative people will talk about limitations are good for creativity. Limitations can support creativity, contrary to what you might otherwise think where it's like, well, if it's wide open, you can do anything.
00:35:53
Speaker
But that's the problem, you could do anything. Yeah, that's paralysis by analysis almost. Maro talks about that a lot with design. He talks about that a lot. Yeah. A lot of writers will talk about that too, where sometimes it's the limitations that give you a starting place, that give you something to build off of and something interesting to start at. And depending on what you're doing, maybe you later go back and you remove those or you do something different. But by that point, you've started. And when there is no limitations, when it's open-ended entirely,
00:36:23
Speaker
Where do you start? You have no starting point, because it's everything. And so that structure gives you a place within to do that spontaneousness, that creativity, that whatever version of that you're talking about at the time.
00:36:41
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I think that's kind of that fine balance that you have to tread. Whether you are naturally more of a structured person or naturally more of a chaotic person, you do have to tread that fine balance between fitting into somebody else's plan, whether it's at work or at home, and sort of rolling with the punches and letting life come to you.
00:37:06
Speaker
And I I guess I have realized a lot more as somebody who does naturally embrace sort of the The flow of life the the chaos of life sort of the all of this stuff I realized that Me doing a couple of small things of preparedness of putting together a minor plan even if it's like a rough sketch like
00:37:35
Speaker
at this time we're going to be at this place, or on this day I know we want to do this thing.
Advice on Mindful Planning
00:37:43
Speaker
That does tend to give people a little more feeling of security, of encouragement, rather than just hanging them out to dry and letting them go, while I know that Joe's in charge of this thing, but I don't know what it's going to be. I don't know what's going to happen.
00:38:01
Speaker
just sharing that stuff and sort of having that minor structure does give people this sense of, okay, it's all gonna be okay. I don't know exactly what it is yet, but it's gonna be fine because I have this idea of what it's gonna roughly look like.
00:38:18
Speaker
You know, I feel like that's a big part of it. And I think that's why, you know, sort of tying back into our magic topic, you know, we had Gerard in the story, Gerard Capation, sort of rebel against Erza and go like, this is messed up. Like he didn't see the big picture because Erza was so set on holding all of his cards close to his vest slash just making stuff up on the spot.
00:38:46
Speaker
you know, that he didn't let the people that were most crucial to his plan into his plan. And I think that can be a thing that happens in real life where if you don't let people see what you're doing, what your plan looks like, or say, hey, I don't know what I'm doing in this moment, they freak out because they don't know if they can trust you. Here's my last thing before we get to actionable advice.
00:39:09
Speaker
Alex, what situations, you seem to be a little more of a planner than me. So in what situations do you find yourself winging it? When are you comfortable winging it and just going with the flow, just letting go of any plan? Well, and that's the thing to sort of answer your question or to take a half step back and then to build up some momentum to answer your question. Love it. That is a thing that I had to deal with at work.
00:39:37
Speaker
I don't know, like eight years ago or something, I was working with a friend of mine, actually, it was probably like a decade. Regardless, I tend to, I'm a planner. I want to, when I, especially big situations, when I want to move, when I'm looking at the time we were working in the supply department, so we were getting, you know, a bunch of shipment just of brochures and pallets and things we were gonna have to store. And I want to, before I start, I want to have it all planned out.
00:40:08
Speaker
that is unrealistic. Sometimes you can do that a lot of the time. You can't do that for various reasons. But he is much, much more spontaneous. And like he is the opposite. He doesn't want to plan anything. And so he and I had to kind of counter each other out. But that was a thing I ended up learning from him that there are times where rather than trying to create a plan from the very beginning to the very end, I should create sort of my rough plan
00:40:38
Speaker
and then start working on it. Because quite often, once I get going, I'll have a better idea of where I'm gonna be at the end. So for the example of trying to find a space to put 50 pallets of prospectuses, rather than trying to figure out where all 50 spots are right away, maybe I know I have 10. So let's get 10 put away.
00:41:04
Speaker
And as I'm putting those 10 away, I might say, hey, you know what? That's only like four boxes right there. I could move those, and that opens up another spot. And I can start to find those other little things, and I can start to build the rest of my plan as I'm enacting the first piece. So for me, winging it isn't usually just winging it. It's more like I'm going to plan 10%. And then while I'm executing that 10%, I will use what I'm seeing doing that
00:41:35
Speaker
to sketch out the rest of it and kind of move forward piece at a time. Does that make sense? No, that makes perfect sense. Does that answer your question? No, absolutely it does. And I think that's very revealing. And I think a lot of people are going to hear this and say, yeah, I'm the same way. Whereas for me, it's kind of like, I know where I want to get to.
00:41:58
Speaker
but I have no idea what's gonna happen in between here and there and so it's not gonna be an A to B thing for me it's gonna be an A all the way through the alphabet winding back and forth across the map to Z and I think that sort of thing you know it's a it's a very
00:42:14
Speaker
It's a similar outcome. It's a very different process. And I guess that maybe is a good segue into our actionable advice is, for me, my takeaway from thinking about all this stuff is, I think you just need to be aware of, you need to be mindful of those moments when you need to plan more. As a person who naturally doesn't plan,
00:42:40
Speaker
You need to consider sort of the impact that your natural tendencies to not plan, if that's where you are, sort of affect people in a negative way and put people on edge, especially in teams and group settings where you're responsible for a certain thing. I think it can help to be that much more on the ball and sort of put people's minds at ease.
00:43:08
Speaker
you know, even if it's a little bit out of your comfort zone, I think, you know, being mindful of other people and what your tendencies can impact on them. I think that is a big thing for me. I think my piece of the actional advice here is to be cognizant of the fact that even if you are kind of one thing most of the time for I tend to be a planner, you aren't always going to that isn't always going to be the best tool for you in every context.
00:43:35
Speaker
because people are a lot more complex than just one thing. So for an example, well, I tend to be a planner and like I said, my version of winging it most of the time is sketching out enough of a plan that I can start working on it that I can then keep planning while I'm doing the piece that I already know. I discovered when I was writing and I've written a couple novels, I wrote magic articles for a website that doesn't exist anymore for like almost a year and a half.
00:44:05
Speaker
Um, two years, regardless, like doing all this writing, I discovered that I'm actually, um, in the, in the novel world, what is called a discovery writer. And those are people who basically have, they don't learn the story until they're writing it. Um, they'll have pieces of it, but you have to, I have to write it to learn all, to learn most of it. Um, I tried to plan out, have a big, massive planning document for my first novel.
00:44:34
Speaker
And I got about a third of the way through, and then I was off the rails from that. And so I learned that for some people, they're planners. They build this planning document. And that can mostly get them beginning to end. And sometimes there'll be some changes. It's not going to all be 100%. But that's kind of how they write. Like Brandon Sanderson, my favorite author, that's how he writes. There's little bits where things will change. And he gives himself, like he says, he tends to discovery, write his characters. That's how he finds their voice.
00:45:02
Speaker
He'll just write random things from their point of view to just kind of get an idea who they are, but he plans the story. For me, my, you know, planning document is basically the first draft of the story. I'll come up with enough details that I can start writing with a rough idea of what the ending is, a rough idea of what the beginning is, and I will just write my way there if I can. And sometimes I need to sit down and plan little pieces to get me the rest of the way there.
00:45:30
Speaker
But ultimately, that's how I get my first, that's how I get my planning document. And there was a lot of articles that would write that. And even within that, that's how I wrote most of my articles. But there was a few times when I had to sit down and do it very differently. I remember when I went to GP Las Vegas in 2015, I started three or four different articles.
00:45:55
Speaker
I didn't really know how to write that until I sat down and I actually wrote an entire outline for my GP Vegas article. Then I was able to follow that outline beginning to end, and that's how I did it. Even if you have an idea of what your tendencies are, sometimes be open to trying out tools that you're not sure will fit for you because sometimes they do, or sometimes you can use them in a way that's a little different from how other people use them, but it works better for you.
00:46:25
Speaker
I think that makes perfect sense. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of all about treading the lines, treading that line of your natural tendencies and the context that you're in. And I think that's a lot of our actionable advice, you know, is be mindful, be aware. You don't necessarily need to change yourself, but you just need to know what is going on around you and inside you. And that's kind of the perfect thing.
00:46:53
Speaker
It's it's kind of the old adage, you know, you have to know the rules before you can break them. And it's like, you should, you should understand kind of who you are, who you want to be and kind of what you're putting out there and decide if that's what you want to be doing. Sometimes it won't be, but sometimes it will. And it's like, okay, this is what I want to be doing. Then let's find people who are, you know, want to be around this or that this works that is this is more compatible with. But sometimes you realize, you know, I don't really want to be putting this thing out that I'm doing. So that's when it's time to make a change.
00:47:23
Speaker
And I think as goblins, we highly recommend breaking rules. So, you know, plan or don't break it. Do it every one. Just breaking anything, just about, you know. That's a fair point. I mean, the best way to break something is to break something else on it. Like, come on, that's... That's two smashes for the price of one. Yeah, you take a rule and smash it into a different rule. That's just bad.
00:47:58
Speaker
That's our show. You can find the podcast at Goblin Lore Pod on Twitter or email any questions, comments, or concerns to goblinlorepodcast at gmail.com.
00:48:09
Speaker
If you'd like to support your friendly neighborhood gobslugs, you can do so at patreon.com slash goblinlaurapod. This episode of Goblin Lore was hosted by Joe Redemann, who you can find on Twitter at FinHorn, that's F-Y-N-D, Horn. This episode was also co-written and co-hosted by Alex Newman, who you can find on Twitter at Alexander New M. Engineering, editing, and production for this episode was by Joe Redemann.
00:48:37
Speaker
Our music is by Wintergatan, who you can find at wintergatan.com. That's wintergatan.com. Logo by Steven Raphael on Twitter at stevenrathol. Thank you all for listening. And remember, goblins, like snowflakes, are only dangerous in numbers.