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Episode 87: SCALE the Mountains of the Prison Realm
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Hello, Podwalkers, and welcome to the Goblin Lore Podcast!
In today's episode Hobbes is revisiting a solo episode that he did (#38) on the importance of S.M.A.R.T. goals as a motivational and achievement tool, while explaining how Nicol Bolas almost certainly used those kinds of goals to help his long-term planning. We all know how that turned out though... which leads us to Problem Solving and a novel 5 step method called S.C.A.L.E!
Again we would like to state that Black Lives Matter (with a link to where you can offer support both monetary and not).
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As promised, we plan to keep these Mental Health Links available moving forward too. For general Mental Health the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) has great resources for people struggling with mental health concerns as well as their families. We also want to draw attention to this article on stigma from NAMI's site.
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- National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: 1-800-273-TALK (8255)
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- Trans Lifeline (US): (877) 565-8860
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. 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).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction & Reflection on SMART Goals
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers, and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lore Podcast. This is Hobbskew, and you're going to be just me today, kind of doing a follow-up to an episode that was way back in May of 2019, where we introduced, this was episode 38 of Goblin Games, Dragons are Smart.
00:00:49
Speaker
It specifically was an episode that was looking at smart goals through the lens of Nicol Bolas and kind of what his plans had been as he was trying to regain his godhood, really focusing on the concept of smart goals. Well, we're going to do a follow up to that today, because as we know, sometimes our goals, we don't meet them. We have problems that get in the way. We have things that come up. We have things that we couldn't have even anticipated for as much as we made a smart goal. We're going to review what that a smart goal is first.
00:01:18
Speaker
and then talk about novel strategy for problem solving. And we're going to look at it probably through the lens of Nicol Bolas, let's be honest, because that's who I tend to look through things through.
The Elements of SMART Goals
00:01:29
Speaker
But this basically is going to start off with just a review of what smart goals are.
00:01:34
Speaker
You can also go back and listen to episode 38 if you want a little bit more detail and kind of ideas and strategies on how to create your own SMART goals as you're looking towards things that you might be working on long term or short term. But basically, SMART is an acronym.
00:01:51
Speaker
that stands for specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, and timely. These are the elements that need to go into a goal to kind of help them. It's a way to kind of help us focus our goals to make them more concrete. So instead of saying things that are very vague or general, like I want to lose weight, I want to be happier, it's kind of asking, well, how are you going to do that? What would that look like?
00:02:17
Speaker
So if I was trying to lose weight, how much weight? When do I want to lose it by? What's the timeline? How am I going to do it? And that's what each of these steps does. So specific just means that your goal is specific. It's not vague. The more specific you can make a goal, kind of the better chance that you have of knowing what it is you're trying to accomplish.
00:02:37
Speaker
Measurable is simply that idea that the goal is something that can be measured. It is very difficult to say that how we could all agree that you're happier. It's not as easy, especially if you're working with someone to know what happier means or knowing what does it mean if somebody just says that they want to lose weight because that could mean a wide range of things. You could lose a pound. You could be trying to lose 20.
00:03:01
Speaker
Attainable is kind of this idea that it's, how are you going to do it? Is this a goal that is realistic or not? So if I say that I want to be a millionaire by next week, that probably is not a very attainable goal. We want to make sure that the goals are something
00:03:17
Speaker
That are achievable something that we are going to be able to accomplish now This does not mean that the goals need to be easy doesn't mean that we shouldn't be challenging ourselves But we also want to be doing things that we that are possible for us to be working towards R is relevant so relevant is why are you doing this goal?
00:03:36
Speaker
There's a couple of versions of smart. Some just use this as realistic, which kind of goes along with the A that we had before. I really like the relevant version because it's asking you the question of why are you doing this goal? Why is it important to you? Why is it something that you want to be working on?
00:03:54
Speaker
And finally, T is for timely. This is the idea that this is a goal that you're putting a timeframe on. It's not a goal that you're going to get to someday or I would like to do or eventually. It's kind of trying to narrow down a timeframe that you're going to work on the goal.
Nicol Bolas: A Strategic Case Study
00:04:07
Speaker
But as we know, the best laid plans do not always go well. Last time when we did this episode, we talked about Bolas and we were talking really about kind of him and War of the Spark. We were talking about this idea that he had had kind of, I used him as an example because
00:04:24
Speaker
of the characters that we have seen. Bolas really is a planner. He is somebody that had clear cut goals. A lot of times when we talk about the Gatewatch, I joke that their goal is really to just kind of do whatever comes up, what comes to mind, and then just hope that it works. And then when it doesn't, there's almost like a deus ek machina. And I mean, it's good for storytelling in the sense that, you know, we need the heroes to almost lose
00:04:48
Speaker
But we don't really see our heroes make a plan. The plan to deal with Bolas was kind of, well, we all get together on Kaladesh and then we're going to go confront him. When they had him on Amonkhet, they basically just like ran straight at him with no thought. He was able to just easily turn them aside, which is actually a very, I think, telling thing about the Amonkhet storyline. But Bolas had a plan. He wanted to regain his godhood. He wanted to regain the pre-mending
00:05:16
Speaker
status of what planeswalkers weren't able to do before. Like I said, the men need if you want to go back to that. So Bola said, you know, he had the plans to kind of had the planer bridge. He had the, from Ixalan, he had the what was trapping everybody on there on on to Ravnica when it drew them there.
00:05:36
Speaker
So he had plans in mind. He had supposedly contingencies. We had Liliana being controlled. She was able to fight through it, but he had a pact with her that if she broke that, then she was going to be killed. I mean, he had kind of thought through all this stuff, and he had planned for it.
00:05:53
Speaker
And honestly, the Gatewatch, I mean, War of the Spark was not the best story. We harped on that throughout the show. But we know that, too, that Bolas kind of sits in the background. He just is kind of that general that doesn't really do anything, which I don't like as a characterization of him, because we already know that he's been in the past willing to get his hands dirty. He's been willing to confront the Gatewatch to kind of sit back and assume that his plans are all going to work out.
00:06:19
Speaker
is not really how I picture Bolas from a storyline perspective. It does let us kind of look though at problem solving, because obviously he didn't accomplish his goal to regain his pre-amending status. He did not really, you know, he failed. I mean, he actually ended up with this without a spark. Not everybody knows this. Basically, Jace knows this at this point.
00:06:44
Speaker
That bolus has been trapped by his brother ugin in the prison realm, which was bolus's meditation realm
00:06:51
Speaker
Well, that gives Bolas a lot of time to be sitting around. And I actually think that that's why problem solving, to look back at kind of, well, what are the next steps? What am I going to do? How am I going to regain my spark? Whatever it is that he has a next goal for, what is the problems? He could look back and do kind of a after action plan to look back at everything that led up toward the spark to see what went wrong and try to plan from there again if he was ever in that situation.
00:07:20
Speaker
I really want to look at this as kind of this idea that Bolas' problem right now is simply that he no longer has a spark. He is basically an elder dragon. I mean probably still has a lot of power but he is trapped in a realm with his brother basically as a jailer.
00:07:38
Speaker
I think we all know based on storylines and how comic books and magic works that this is not probably going to be true forever. So let's look at some of the things that we can talk about with Bolas as it comes to problem solving.
Introduction to the SCALE Method
00:07:51
Speaker
So the problem solving method that we are going to talk about is five step problem solving, and it is called scale. So scale basically is this idea that you have a problem that you're trying to scale or overcome. longtime listeners of the show know that even like things, smart scale, I really like my acronyms.
00:08:11
Speaker
I work with a veteran population. So I'm used to a lot of military speak that is acronyms. I also think that they do help tend to make things easier when you're trying to keep in mind what the steps are. So scale scale stands for number one, specify the problem, you'll notice that it is very similar to the specific or specify what your goal is. It's a similar idea. The idea here is that you're trying to specify what the problem is that you're trying to overcome.
00:08:39
Speaker
I personally like to frame this in the form of a question because I think that it's going to help us with the later steps that we're going to get into. So for this one, I might say, how am I going to regain my spark? So you're answering a question.
00:08:55
Speaker
how am I going to get out of the prison realm? If that's just his goal is to kind of be even tied to a different plane where he can maybe get out, that could be the goal. The key is here that we need to know what the problem is that Bolas is specifically trying to solve, because that's going to help us when it comes to the next step. So the next step is C, which is consider all possibilities.
00:09:21
Speaker
And the goal in this step is to seriously consider anything that comes to mind. So if we're doing this in a group setting, which is how I often teach this, we have a whiteboard going, we write down anything that anyone says, and we just write it down. And at this stage, that's all we do. We're trying to come up with any solutions
00:09:43
Speaker
that could solve the problem that we have before us. This is generally what you would call brainstorming if you were looking at kind of a different word or lingo for it. And it also is based on this idea that we want to generate, not evaluate. A lot of people when they work on problem solving have a tendency to already be judging whether a solution is good or bad as soon as it kind of comes into their mind.
00:10:09
Speaker
Or they skip the step entirely and they kind of take whatever the first thing that pops in their mind is and that's the solution that they go with and they kind of head down and just go through. They may consider one or two but they tend to write them off very quickly. It's very natural to do this.
00:10:26
Speaker
However, this is very limiting as we'll see as we kind of move along in this step is there are actually lots of solutions. Not all of them are good. Not all of them are healthy. But at this point, we don't really care. We want to get down as many possible ideas.
00:10:42
Speaker
One thing that I like about this is it helps people with cognitive flexibility, especially if you're somebody that maybe struggles with a little rigidity, or you have some difficulty with kind of seeing things from multiple perspectives, getting down as many ideas as creative as you can.
00:10:58
Speaker
No matter how stupid they sound or how stupid they may ultimately end up being, it doesn't matter. They can be silly. They can be ridiculous. All we care about is, is this something that could theoretically solve the problem that I am working on right now?
00:11:14
Speaker
So generate, don't evaluate. And the other thing that comes down to this is a lot of times people don't think that they have choices. There are always choices. And I think that being able to see them eventually, even if you have to choose a solution that isn't something that you like, but is potentially the best or the most healthy in the situation that you're at, it is good to realize that you had choices that you did not choose.
00:11:41
Speaker
And I tell people, you know, this would be the idea if I need money. It is an option to rob a bank. It is an option to sell drugs. It is an option to steal from other people. It is an option to sell everything that I own. You know, if it will solve my problem, these things are on the table. And
00:12:00
Speaker
We may choose not to explore them further, but by dismissing them, we're also kind of limiting ourselves. Because when we think of ideas of like, okay, well, I could steal from somebody, we might realize that, okay, well, like, I don't want to do that. But our brain might then automatically generate the idea that, well, there's somebody I could borrow money from, or I could ask somebody to help me out, get some money from someone.
00:12:22
Speaker
You know, we don't want to take anything off the table when we're considering all of our possibilities. So, with Bolas stuck in the meditation realm, or the prison realm, as Ugin personally wants to call it, as a horrible big brother,
00:12:40
Speaker
He is going to want to come up with whatever solutions he can think of. You know, we don't know what all of them are because especially given that this is a storyline and that involves fantasy, Bolas may know of spells that we don't know of or he may know of abilities that he has that he hasn't told people. He may know of ways to travel planes that we don't.
00:13:01
Speaker
However, I want to know what these are. If I was sitting there with Bolas, I don't want to know, okay, Bolas, what can you come up with? I mean, is your solution going to be that you're going to try to just take on your brother, who is still a planeswalker? Are you going to wait until Ugin feels that he has to be drawn somewhere else and kind of come up with a plan for how to escape during then?
00:13:23
Speaker
we might think that there are other planeswalkers that could enter this. For instance, we know Ashiok has been to the prison realm based on some of the art that we got from War of the Spark. He had some involvement with Ugin. I mean, there are ways that we could be thinking of what is every possible solution that Bolas might have. Now, remember, this goes back to the problem. Is he trying to just get a new spark or is he trying to get out of the prison realm or the meditation realm?
00:13:50
Speaker
So, you know, I would joke, you know, like, you know, he's gonna build skyship weather light, he is going to resurrect ursa somehow, he's going to, I mean, and we all know, once again, I'm not going to evaluate, I wanted to judge right there, my brain was already like, we don't want to bring back ursa, ursa is bad.
00:14:07
Speaker
it is to realize that we don't want to dismiss anything that we might be able to think of. Does bullets have a way to communicate with his other siblings? And if so, what could they do? You know, are any of them going to be willing to kind of they're not planes walkers. So what could happen? We don't know fully maybe what the powers of an elder dragon are.
00:14:28
Speaker
And if I'm wrong on any of this, that's fine. This is where we're just generating ideas. If you want to write in to tell me the storyline pieces that I'm missing, I'd be very happy to know it because that's going to give me information if I'm trying to kind of think of this from that, okay, is this actually realistic or not, which is going to come later.
00:14:49
Speaker
So later is when we assess all possibilities. So this is the A. Now is when we actually start crossing off solutions. I mean, ideally, with as much time as we have to solve a problem, if we had just kind of days on end or we'd have time to be doing whatever we could, we could do pros and cons for every single solution that we came up with.
00:15:14
Speaker
But the goal here is that we just want to do pros and cons. If we're able to quickly at this point now cross off ideas because we can think of one con that is high enough that it is not going to make this solution a good one for us. And I would say that the key to remember here is for you, the person who is doing this problem solving.
00:15:36
Speaker
It's knowing what is kind of going to matter for you, not for other people that are maybe in your family or others. This is how you are choosing and what you are choosing to be the best solution for yourself. But it is doing pros and cons.
00:15:53
Speaker
doing pros and cons is not a simple matter of just writing down one column of pros one column of cons and tabulating them up and saying okay this solution has more pros than cons comparing it to the other solutions it has a difference of positive four so this is going to be the solution i'm going to choose
00:16:13
Speaker
We all know that the positives and the negatives, the pros and the cons that we're going to have are going to be weighted. And we have to be able to tell what those weights are. So if in the solution above I gave of trying to like rob a bank or rob somebody,
00:16:28
Speaker
For some people, maybe that prison time or that risk of getting caught or that risk is enough of a con to just say, nope, I'm not going to choose it. For others, that's not true. It may be that that life situation is desperate enough that you need to consider that, that that is your possibility. And the benefits for maybe you to be able to provide for your family, they're going to outweigh the cons of getting caught or the risk of getting caught.
00:16:54
Speaker
So it's realizing that pros and cons have relative weights to them. And in this step, you're trying to assess what you think is going to be the best solution at this point.
Planning with the SCALE Method
00:17:07
Speaker
Because what we're going to do as we move forward is we're going to be able to we may revisit this down the road. For now, you're going to assess using pros and cons, and you're going to choose which solution you think is the most likely to kind of get you towards your goal at this point or to solve that problem.
00:17:25
Speaker
So now that we have those three steps done and I oftentimes split this up as I am learning it with or teaching it to people and we're kind of learning it is S, C and A kind of are where we get to a solution. It's a lot of practice of just how do I generate solutions? How do I brainstorm more ways to be maybe flexible with my thinking and then how to assess how to do those pros and cons.
00:17:50
Speaker
Now, we now move on to the L, which is to lay out a plan. Laying out a plan is where we ask ourselves, what is the who, what, why, when, where, how, that I am going to actually need to use to be able to carry out my plan. This is all the resources that you're going to need. This is the steps that you're going to take. And I say that, ideally, you're going to be as
00:18:15
Speaker
painfully detailed as possible as you come up with your steps. This is an example of where I think Bolas has done his planning in the past, where it comes to making a goal or a plan for his goal. He's used this laying out a plan to like very good effect. And once again, as we go through this, it doesn't mean that it's going to work out. It doesn't mean that we are going to be successful. What it means is that we are trying to give ourselves the best chance to account for anything that could get in the way of our goal.
00:18:44
Speaker
I mean, sorry of our plan. So in this situation, Bolas had kind of the plan that he went with with War of the Spark, and he had steps to it. He led to it across blocks as he went and basically gathered these artifacts with a plan to kind of learn the Elder's spell.
00:18:59
Speaker
That is what he had done and he had steps that he took in order to do this. He knew what the resources were. He knew what planes he had to visit. He had the order that he had to do them in. Bolas had kind of tried to account for all of this. And that really is what laying out a plan is about. It is being painful. It is being detailed.
00:19:19
Speaker
I tell people all the time, step one, get a pen step to write down on a piece of paper. Because what if you don't have pen and paper? I mean, this is trying to make a plan and realizing that you don't have the resources that you need is actually important because that might be what the first step is. This is involved. So I say so I like to think of it as kind of the who, what, why, when, where and how. So
00:19:42
Speaker
Who do I need to help me with this plan? When am I going to do it? Where do I need to go to get my resources? Why am I doing this? It's just kind of a reminder of that I'm trying to solve it. What are all the things that I need? How am I going to do it? What are the steps? So basically writing down everything that you can think of.
00:20:02
Speaker
that you're going to need. So first, I start off with resources. Do I need time? And in this situation, bolus has the time. That's not an issue. But I mean, it is if we're trying to plan for something, if I'm working on the podcast, for instance, and I'm trying to problem solve that we've missed a few weeks or trying to work on getting an editor, what are the steps? I mean, all of this means I need time, I need to know that I have time in my week to record.
00:20:28
Speaker
We have time to sit down and talk about it. Maybe Alex and I get together and do a meeting to plan out our next month. Do I have time to do the editing? All of these things are things that could come up that get in the way of us putting this out for you all. There are things that have in the past and part of that comes down to did we do enough problem solving? Did we do enough organization and planning?
00:20:50
Speaker
So laying out a plan is really to just kind of become as obnoxiously specific and detailed as you can. And if there's anything that bolus is good at doing, it's being obnoxious Lee specific, you guys all thought I was gonna insult him, but we know that's not gonna happen on this cast.
00:21:12
Speaker
The end step to laying out a plan is to simply choose a time and place. This is similar to when we talked about our SMART goals before of a timeliness. When am I going to do it? How long are we talking a week? Are we talking two days? What is the plan? What is my timeline? When am I going to put this into motion and start it?
00:21:33
Speaker
Last step is to now, it's E. I always joke it's double E because we are going to execute and evaluate the plan. A lot of people, myself included at times execute the plan, we put it into place.
00:21:51
Speaker
And we stop. We don't really kind of think about it. We just kind of do it. And if it works, it works. If it doesn't, it doesn't. And that's probably as far as our evaluation goes. We might get upset and go, well, you know, I couldn't solve the problem. I just kind of move on. I guess I give up. It's not something that it doesn't have a solution to it. Evaluation is the key here because it's asking not only did it work, but how well did it work?
00:22:18
Speaker
Maybe why did it work? Did it completely solve the problem that I was trying to solve? What came up in the course of executing my plan? Did something come up that I didn't account for?
00:22:30
Speaker
Why this is important is when we're doing this is kind of five step problem solving scale. So if you have it written down on your paper is s c a le and you're doing a worksheet on it. At this point, what I will say to do is go back to each step. Because a plan didn't work, or you didn't solve a problem where you it doesn't mean you have to start all over.
00:22:53
Speaker
Now, we may end up starting all over, but we don't necessarily have to. And I think a lot of times that's what ends up happening is we just kind of throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't look to see if anything went well or what could be improved upon. Even when something goes well, we still have room for improvement. And what this step allows us to do is to start working our way back to see where did things fall through. So when Bolas is kind of thinking through his plan, he could skip back
00:23:21
Speaker
through simply to what his plan was and laying it out. He had that nice detailed plan. He didn't account for Liliana. So if he's trying to do kind of a, like an after action plan to see what went wrong with War of the Spark, it may be that that's what he did. It's the things he didn't account for. He couldn't have accounted for, or he should have, but he didn't account for Ugin's intervention. He didn't account for Liliana, whatever it is.
00:23:48
Speaker
But if we're kind of looking at our own problems, it's going back each step and seeing, did something go wrong? So in my plan, did I miss something? I plan to renew my driver's license because I have federal holidays off. So Labor Day, I was going to renew my driver's license, I get to the DMV, and it's closed because it's a federal holiday.
00:24:10
Speaker
Those are things that I have to be thinking about. I missed that it doesn't mean that the rest of my plan maybe was bad. It just means that I chose the wrong day and time because I did not think about this. So maybe all I need to do is adjust that okay, I'm going to take some time off work, I'll be able to do it, but the rest of my plan worked out well.
00:24:29
Speaker
Maybe what ended up happening is when I got into it, I missed some of the pros and cons. When I was assessing a possible solution, maybe now that I think about it, I missed some cons that would have made me choose another solution. Or the more I think about it, certain cons or pros actually have more weight to them. Let me choose a different one of these solutions, go back to it and lay out a plan.
00:24:54
Speaker
Maybe when I considered possibilities, I just crossed ones off that weren't good, or in the course of doing all of this, I actually came up with a new plan, or I came up with another solution that could be combined with one of them I already had. There's so many possible solutions. That's why the brainstorming is about generating and not evaluating. Maybe I just go back to this step and I find a different solution, or I start doing some more brainstorming to see what else I can do.
00:25:24
Speaker
Or, and this could happen, I actually was, it was the wrong problem. So when I got through with all of it, everything went well and my problem was still not there. So I think of this as something if like maybe I thought I needed to save money and I come up with a plan that I'm going to, you know, cut out drinking Starbucks once a week.
Evaluating and Iterating Plans
00:25:47
Speaker
I like to do it when I go to the VA and okay, I decided that I was going to save money by cutting that out and I do it.
00:25:54
Speaker
And what ends up happening is the problem wasn't actually that it was that I wasn't budgeting other stuff well enough, and I actually need more money to save. And what my problem was, was much bigger in scale, I need to start all over, maybe. So, for instance, if we go through this and bolus, his goal is to just get out of the meditation realm or the prison realm,
00:26:19
Speaker
He does that. He finds himself stuck on a plane. Now let's I'm gonna go with Dominaria because I would love to see bolus and squee buddy cop movie actually finally happened. And he realizes that his plan to get off of there did nothing. He's now stuck on Dominaria. He doesn't have any idea on what he's gonna do. What he really wants is his spark back. And just getting out of the meditation realm maybe was a first step. But that's not the problem that he ultimately wanted to solve.
00:26:49
Speaker
these. So this is where I really like to think of this is all of the steps that are involved with it. Because you don't have to necessarily start over and I just I know I've said this a couple of times already. It's just emphasizing that idea that you can
00:27:07
Speaker
bounce back up, you can look to see, okay, what did I miss? And that kind of is the beauty of doing this kind of problem solving. It is very tedious, at first, to kind of go through this steps. A lot of people, a lot of us, we do this, and we do most of this in our mind, at times. However, I do think that there is value to kind of seeing it written out to kind of knowing what our problem solving technique is.
00:27:36
Speaker
Are we somebody that tends to go with our gut, our first solution, and just run with it? Do we tend to get one or two ideas and just say, nope, we can't do that? Are we somebody that generates a lot of solutions, but as soon as we think of them, we just say, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope, and the reasons why not? Or do we actually spend time just writing them down and getting used to that non-judgmental approach to them?
00:28:00
Speaker
Do we just do well at laying out a plan? Or do we need some guidance? Do we need to help ask for others? What am I missing? What are the steps? What is involved with doing things? I think of this when we teach things like brushing your teeth is a mindful activity. It's a similar idea that there's a lot of steps that actually go into brushing our teeth. We don't think about them because they're routine and habit.
00:28:24
Speaker
When you're trying to do problem solving, especially if things have been getting in the way of what your goals are, you want to get that level of detail down. Even if it's just to get used to thinking about what all the steps are that are involved in following through with something because it's actually easier to see what went wrong or what did you miss and to learn from that moving forward.
Comparing Strategic Villains
00:28:47
Speaker
So, you know, not a lot of lore today I use bolus really as our focus because he is stuck in the meditation slash prison realm and I don't think that he is going to stay there. And this is an example of him having the time to sit there and problem solve. I mean, I actually think that
00:29:04
Speaker
For all of his evilness and horrible faults, Bolas is a good example of a planner. Most villains are in stories. I mean, I mean, this is what we see with Thanos, who kind of, it can be an analog for Bolas here with our big bad.
00:29:19
Speaker
Villains tend to be known because they have plans now they may be Rube Goldberg type plans such as a James Bond villain or in our situation when Ursa was quote-unquote a hero He had these Rube Goldberg really involved plans that basically don't seem to make sense However, the idea is that everything is connected and there was actually tons of planning that went into it now
00:29:44
Speaker
That's what we get from our villains and I obviously am including Urza in this and if you've ever listened to this show, we are not fans. But Bolas is a good example of somebody who is a problem solver and somebody that is a planner. Doesn't mean once again, you can plan, you can problem solve, you can go through all this. It still doesn't mean that you're going to be successful.
00:30:07
Speaker
and recognizing that part at the end of the day is important because a lot of times this is where you could have kind of bolus slip into hopelessness or maybe him kind of just feel defeated and that's what a lot of us feel when our plans don't go well especially
00:30:23
Speaker
If we sat down and really thought about what went well, what went right, what didn't, and realizing that at the end of the day, there are things that are still out of our control. But do I give up or do I kind of try to approach it from a different angle? Do I start over? And that's where we are with bolus right now, I'm going to be honest, I really do believe that
00:30:42
Speaker
We are going to see him again. I mean, that's just also coming from somebody that thinks that, well, you're talking to a bolus apologist and somebody who just likes the cards that they've done with bolus. But honestly, when they've done storytelling with bolus, well, it's been some of my favorites. Even looking at kind of the stories being told from the perspective of being on Tarkir or from Tarkir.
00:31:06
Speaker
and looking at him and Ugin's birth and their childhood. It is very intriguing and interesting. It also is always good for you to have a villain that is a match for our superheroes. And we have the plucky superheroes that are sometimes brash and don't plan. And we may see that change. Maybe we see them realizing that they need to slow down. They need to maybe now that they have this so when we left war with the spark,
00:31:32
Speaker
They kind of had directions they were going in to kind of follow the threads of what bolus had left behind that actually could Be interesting to see how did they plan they were gonna go out and search for? Dovin they were gonna go look for Tezzeret we got to do these things either the storylines Liliana to start wrapping up or at least following and part of this could be does the gate watch or the splintered versions of it and
00:32:01
Speaker
do some better problem solving. Though, once again, to recap, scale is our problem solving method that we're talking about here, specify problems, consider all possibilities, assess the best, layout a plan, and then execute and evaluate.
Closing Remarks & Announcements
00:32:20
Speaker
So thank you for joining me for another episode. We also want to thank Grinding Coffee Company, our partner that we've been working with. If you go to our page, you can see that we now have a link to go to Grinding Coffee Company. They will get a discount for using our code, and it also supports that company, which is a black owned LGBT run coffee site that is supporting gamers.
00:32:46
Speaker
We also want to let everybody know that we are working on getting an editor to kind of – I talked a little bit about this in the last episode, but to kind of just help out a little bit with my time right now, I'm looking to see if we can expand into having an editor join us, which is going to take a little bit of money. So we are working on expanding our Patreon. Our Patreon is still available. Our Discord is starting to be more active.
00:33:10
Speaker
Yeah, anyway, thank you all. We're hoping to be coming with you either next week or the week after to follow up with the Carnan Depression. And until then, thank you for all joining us today, or joining me today. Yeah, that's me, Hobbs Q.
00:33:29
Speaker
And that's our show for today. You can find the host on Twitter. Hobbs Q can be found at hogsq, and Alex Newman can be found at Mel underscore comical. Send any questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to at goblinmoorpod on Twitter, or email us at goblinmoorpodcast at email.com.
00:33:47
Speaker
If you want to support your friendly neighborhood gospel, the task can be found at patreon.com slash goblinworkpod. Opening and closing music by Vindergotten, who can be found on twitter at Vindergotten, or online at vindergotten.bandcamp.com. Logo art by Steven Raffaeo, who can be found on twitter at steve raffled.
00:34:10
Speaker
Goblin lore is proud to be presented by hipsters of the coast as part of their growing vorthos content as well as magic content of all kinds. Check them out on twitter at hipsters MTG or online at hipstersofthecoast.com. Thank you all for listening and remember goblins like snowflakes are only dangerous in numbers.