Author: admin

A few years back, I got curious about exactly what the universe is like. 

My curiosity wasn’t necessarily focused on whether God, or karma, or luck exist (though certainly those ideas do seem to affect human actions quite a bit, despite no real physical evidence of them), but more about the what of what the universe is.

Like, what is it all made up of? What does it actually look like? If you looked at a map or a model of the universe (however it could impossibly be constructed), what would you see?

This interest quickly led me to cosmology, which is the study of the nature of the universe (from the Greeks’ – the origins of so much of our science – kosmos, meaning the order or the world). I will preface here by pointing out that even though I am hoping to spread expertise and insight here, I am certainly no expert. I am an interested tourist of this study still, just taking pictures as I safari across the broad shoulders of various giants. 

But I have developed a picture, a mental model, of what I understand the universe is like. I am sure that true scientists could poke holes in it all day long, and I am also sure I have embellished certain parts into inaccuracy just to keep them clear in my own memory. But in sharing it, I hope to both solidify my own understanding of it, and perhaps update the understanding of the universe in your own mind, reader, whoever you are.

So: We are made of atoms, the building blocks of the universe (or at least as good a place to start as any). Atoms are often mentally pictured, thanks to most elementary educations, as very tiny balls, and most people either imagine them as balls, or remember that there is a nucleus in the center of the atom (which itself is made up of little balls including protons), with electrons hovering around it (meaning the atom is often imagined as a ball with other balls circling it – which leads to associations with a radiation warning sign, given that atomic power often comes with unseen danger. See how your culture protects you in this strange, hopefully effective way).

Of course, like most simplifications of scientific matter and processes (like this one I’m writing now), this model is wrong in its lack of specificity. Atoms aren’t balls – they’re more like locations of energy. The particles that make up atoms are perhaps better pictured as vibrations in the air, in that they are so small and so energetic that when we look as closely as possible at them, all we can often see are their effects. We can’t see them directly – we can only understand them by looking at what they do.

Which leads us to the universe, and specifically how the universe started. Because when you study the effects of all of these atoms around us, and how they interact and how we age, and how volcanoes erupt and water flows and how minerals form and continents shift and planets spin over time, you start to see an arrow, a pattern. And that arrow generally shifts in one direction: From beginning to end, from uniformity to entropy. “Time’s arrow,” it is often called. Things generally go from more uniform and more ordered to less, and while exceptions can be the case in specific areas, if you zoom out to an even larger picture, what you find is that even though some parts of whatever you’re studying seem way more uniform than they used to be, the entire picture itself is more chaotic, less ordered, than before. Things more easily shift forwards than backwards, and forward is often more shattered, detailed, and chaotic than what came previous.

Case in point: The entire universe, every atom that makes up us and all of the birds and bees and gold and carbon and suns and meteorites and galaxies, used to be hydrogen. Hydrogen is an atom that contains a proton (which remember, is just a vibration) and one electron (a smaller more transitive kind of vibration), and in mere seconds after “The Big Bang” – which, if you ask me, was more of a crack than a bang, which I’ll explain in longer time than it took to happen – most of everything that we know has ever existed had gone from whatever it was before into a bunch of small wild particles, which then formed into mostly hydrogen atoms. Which are still here – 74% of the universe is still hydrogen.

Helium (which is a proton with two electrons, also relatively simple to form) came soon after, all within about 20 minutes after the crack (and 24% of the universe is still helium). And then the other atoms came around eventually – it only took about a billion years or so for it to kind of resemble something we’d recognize, and this all happened about 13.8 billion years or so, according to what we can currently verify with the technology we have.

What was the crack? In the beginning, there are four forces. There are only four actual forces that can move or change any of the atoms in our universe, and they are: Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force. Gravity and electromagnetism you may be familiar with – one is very clear whenever you drop something on your foot, and the other is behind the movements that you see in electricity and magnetism, where atoms and electrons are attracted to or repelled from each other. The strong force and the weak force are not as apparently familiar, but you already know them. Something has to keep the tightly knit center of the atom, the nucleus, together, and scientists call that force the strong force. And something has to keep that electron rotating around that nucleus, and that force is called the weak force. Scientists are still learning about both of those forces, and the more we understand of them, the more we can better understand the atom and how it connects, both to itself and to the many things (everything) that atoms make up.

(A short aside here: “Which force moves my arm up?” you may ask. And I regret to say I don’t know enough to have the answer, except to say that your movement is governed by these forces – gravity keeps you from being flung away from the planet, and the strong and weak forces keep your atoms from spinning apart. Presumably, the atoms in the cells in your body interact to send electrical signals from your brain to your arm telling your muscles to contract and pull on each other, but how that happens, we’d have to speak to a real scientist to explain clearly.)

But in the before the beginning, there was only one force. Gravity, electromagnetism, the strong force, and the weak force all have “shapes” of a sort – they all seem to fit together somehow, or have fit together in the past, like a dropped plate that broke into four pieces (with perhaps a few extra shards – we aren’t sure). As scientists figure out how the four forces connect, we’ve seen huge leaps in technology – Einstein needed Newton to understand gravity in order to understand the strong and weak forces better, and dropping and moving magnets to create machines allowed for advances in electromagnetism, all the way up to the intricate circuitry built with a deep understanding of nanophysics today. The forces are all interrelated though different, which suggests that they have a common root, a common source.

And as I understand it (again, from my layman’s perspective, so please forgive me if I’m wrong), that’s the “why” of our existence. Something that existed before the universe, some ancestral force, cracked. Something broke. Something that was quiet and whole and stable became not so, for some reason outside of our perception. Perhaps the thing that was our universe collided with something else, or perhaps conditions changed and something finally shattered, or perhaps what really exists is a series of universes – cracks in some larger structure that are all broken in different ways, with completely different types of forces emerging. For all we know, things are still breaking, and we’re just a single splinter of many cracks and bangs out there, with these four forces only specifically working the way they do in our universe because they happened to crack the way they did.

But we’ve gotten off track: Whatever the universe was cracked itself apart, and that caused the forces to start differentiating, and as those forces worked on developing atoms in their own ways, that eventually created hydrogen, then helium, and then (as time passed and things cooled and expanded and crashed together and exploded and re-condensed and exploded again over billions and billions of years) we eventually got all of the atoms and everything that exists today.

What does it all look like now?

Well, if you’re a human who’s not an astronaut or Katy Perry, then you’re standing on Earth, which is what we call an oblong rotating chunk of magma with a crust of minerals and organic material and a thin layering of oxygenated atmosphere currently flying through space at around 67,000 miles an hour, both spinning on its axis and rotating around a much larger superheated orb of plasma known as the Sun. The sun is not a deity as far as we know (which is news to most of humanity that’s existed previously, I think), and in fact isn’t even our first sun. The Earth (and in fact, your body) happens to contain minerals like calcium that could only have been created in the shrapnel of a supernova, and our sun hasn’t yet supernova’d, meaning that this rock has been blasted with some other sun’s remains, probably before our sun even existed yet.

The Earth is not the only thing rotating around the sun, and here we arrive at the solar system, which you have likely heard about. There’s a lot of stuff in our solar system – most people know the planets, but there’s also plenty of asteroids, comets, and as you get farther away from the sun, things get quieter, colder, and the atoms seem to be older and less active. There may be a lot of things floating out there past what we know of our solar system – if they’re not reflecting light it might be hard to see them, and without seeing light from them, we have a hard time telling what they are.

Light is worth a short explanation at this point, as we will need it to see beyond the solar system (to see anything, actually, but that gets us back into biology, which is, again, beyond the scope of this description). Light is made up of photons. Photons were first formed back when the universe cracked, and in fact they’re still around – scientists have identified the Cosmic Microwave Background, which is the very oldest remnants of the very first vibrations of the universe, basically. If the Big Bang left blast marks, the CMB is the blast marks, and it is made up of various photon waves, which themselves are (like everything, really) vibrations in space. Light is a particle, in that it exists at a specific point, and travels (very quickly) through time and space. But it’s also a wave, in that it’s being created all the time from collisions and vibrations and bounces, and flashes and pops. Atoms are tightly compacted vibrations, but light is much flimsier, like ripples on water.

When we look up at all of the stars above us, we’re seeing blips of light from all of the other stars in the universe. This light has traveled to us very quickly, but often from extremely far. In fact, and this is where we start to get into how mind bogglingly big our existence is, even though the universe started out from a very localized point, where everything that has ever existed was within literally a meter or so, when the forces cracked, the space that made up the universe expanded so fast that within a single second, it was about 10 light years across (a light year being the time a light photon will travel in an Earth year – a very long distance). Why isn’t the entire sky full of light? Because the universe expanded faster than light, and the light from distant stars is still too far away to reach us. Enjoy that perspective for a bit, if you like.

Currently, according to calculations done on the light and processes we can see, the universe is about 13.8 billion years old. It has gone from about the size of a meter to 10 light years across in the first second of existence, to 92 billion light years across in the ensuing time. And here is perhaps the most incredible thing about our universe: Not only has it expanded to a great distance extremely fast, but our most knowledgeable scientists currently believe that it is continuing to expand. And while in the past, we believed it might be slowing down and might even return to that meter-sized space it came from, it currently appears that it’s expanding even faster by the second.

If you want to get off the ride at this point, that’s understandable. 92 billion light years is an unimaginable distance for any human – with the universe “only” 13.8 billion years old, no physical object could ever have made a journey all the way across it. But that’s because the universe has expanded across that space – the universe is the space that exists. It’s the space that has developed within the crack of these forces. That makes it very hard to determine what it “looks like” from the outside – presumably, on the outside, since the forces aren’t broken out there, time itself might not really exist (since time is determined by things changing, and if gravity and electromagnetism can’t interact, because they’re the same thing, then there’s no real “time” to mark or speak of). And of course, outside the universe, there isn’t “space” either – space and time are related, and as the universe continues to expand, space must be growing “thinner” somehow, but even what that means, we aren’t sure. Beyond the limits of space and time, we don’t have the ideas needed to even perceive what’s there.

What does it look like “inside” the universe? Galaxies are the main building block we’ve identified, I think, though at places in the universe, there are sometimes just vast tracts of emptiness, or giant clouds of particles, suns supernovaing around each other and crashing and forming and reforming. There are also black holes, which are relatively new to our understanding, because they (they might be “holes” in space time? or “rips” where matter can’t exist or the forces reform in some way?) play with and interact with light in ways that aren’t easily noticeable or understandable.

All of that stuff is just out there, bubbling away, and for all we know, it’ll just keep doing it. Maybe the universe will eventually just expand and expand until it’s all cold and desolate. Maybe the conditions are right for the forces to crack again at some point, or maybe whatever caused them to shatter will happen again? Or will happen right next to us and demolish all known existence in a matter of moments? Who knows. For a while, before we discovered the CMB, many people thought the universe was just an ever-refreshing soup of galaxies, forming and unforming for eternity. But now that we can see and perceive the CMB, we know that the universe has a history and a beginning (and now that the four forces have “broken,” it seems unlikely they will ever re-fit back together).

I’ll leave you with the one thing we do know, and it’s what’s driving the biggest questions cosmology is currently trying to answer. Even though the universe is mostly a bunch of big, noisy happenings inside a bunch of bigger empty quiet nothing that’s expanding more and more quickly over time, it’s surprisingly uniform. That is, on a large enough scale, it’s basically the same throughout.

This needs some explanation. Locally, where we are, the universe is not uniform at all – you’re sitting here, your cat is over there, and from what you can see, the two of you are very, very different. And on a stellar scale, it’s also not uniform – our solar system is hanging out here in the middle of a vast stretch of space, so much so that it’s light years to the next star, and once you go beyond that (which you never will, given that physics says the distance is farther than you can ever physically travel in your lifetime), you can see our system is part of a giant cluster of stars called the Milky Way, which is the galaxy that we’re in. “Giant” is perhaps underplaying it a bit. There are hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way, of which ours is one, sat about ⅔ of the way out on one of the spiral arms (at the center of which, scientists guess, probably lies a huge black hole that holds the whole thing together with gravity, though we can’t really see it yet because of all of the stars in between us and it). 

Outside of the Milky Way, things get dark and quiet again for a while – there is another galaxy that’s about 2.5 million light years from us, which, if you were looking at our galaxy and this other galaxy (called Andromeda) on a 2D plane from a great distance out, would kind of look like another spiral slightly down and to the left of us. Andromeda is currently moving towards us, and in about 4.5 billion years, it will probably collide with the Milky Way Galaxy. That’ll be quite a light show, and could result in the complete destruction of our solar system and either have Andromeda bounce off of the Milky Way or combine with it, but of course none of us alive now will be here to see it.

After that, we arrive at where things are, surprisingly, uniform. There are some other smaller galaxies rotating around both ours and Andromeda, just floating out there in the ether but still affected by our gravity. Then as we zoom out, we start to see clouds of galaxies, and from there (zooming out on an incredible scale), it’s just galaxies as far as the eye can see – there are large ones and small ones, newer ones and older ones as stars form and blow up and fade away, and galaxies that are more stable and others that rotate around each other or are in the middle of crashing or spinning out of control.

Across the entire universe, there are likely trillions of galaxies, and they contain from millions of stars to trillions of stars themselves. They’re all, every one of them, formed from the initial atoms that appeared as the forces cracked. They’re all moving around and affecting each other, and all of our knowledge about how the universe works today comes from watching them – we watch them spin around each other and calculate how much they must weigh, how much matter they must contain (some of them move weirdly, which suggests there may be “dark matter” that we can’t see affecting their movements). We see them flashing or even blinking at different rates, and determine that they must be emitting light at various periods (exploding, condensing, and re-exploding again) or that they must be orbiting something that doesn’t emit as much light, like a black hole or something we haven’t even discovered yet. 

And that’s where the uniformity comes in – if we look in one direction the galaxies look one way, and if we look in another direction, the galaxies are obviously different, but they’re generally spaced out and expand in about the same types of ways. In fact, if we look in both directions, we can’t quite tell where we are in the universe, because it seems to kind of expand in all directions. Uniformity from entropy, you might suggest, though it’s hard to argue that the uniformity we can see is somehow an improved, progressed state. The uniformity around us is more like a dust cloud hanging in the air after an explosion – would anyone suggest this preferable to whatever was there before the explosion?

We are still watching the skies to try to see how things work out there. We can see light from objects, or light bending around objects, or being spun or shifted as it moves towards us. We can see galaxies moving towards or away from us, and we can tell this by the wavelengths of light they emit – light with an increased frequency (called redshifted) usually indicates an object is incoming to us (though usually from many light years away, meaning that the light itself we’re seeing could already be millions of years old). Scientists can’t look at all parts of the sky at the same time, so sometimes it’s a miracle when we get to see a supernova happen, or we only get to see the effects of an event, and we have to predict how it worked. As technology and telescopes improve, we can investigate specific events more closely, or see things more clearly or evaluate different frequencies of light to determine what a celestial body might be made of, or what types of radiations it might emit and on what schedules (and we can make guesses as to why).

We’re still figuring this stuff out – sometimes an observation will suggest something that seems incredible and could never actually be true, but the next will remind us that there are always exceptions, or that the exceptions sometimes prove the rule. Science is like that – it’s only when you do it long enough that things eventually start to make some kind of sense, at least until the next discovery that changes your perspective, and then you get to start over knowing more than you did before.

In the end, the universe looks like us: spinning out of control in an elegant way, as ordered and majestic as it is messy and unfortunate sometimes. As far as science tells us, there’s no big bearded elephant man in the sky punishing or rewarding our behaviors, but there are atoms and chemicals interacting in often predictable but surprisingly complex ways, as they have since the very beginning of time itself, and as they probably will until the last chorus ends.

I presume in the next few years we’ll learn more about the ideas called dark matter or dark energy (so called because they generally don’t emit light, which makes them hard to detect – again, we’re studying effects of effects of effects and trying to draw lines back to how they began), and we will continue to learn more about how to perceive and eventually manipulate light and atoms. Undoubtedly, AI will look at these models we’ve created and help us improve them, and we’ll probably learn how to build things smaller and how to transfer matter and energy more effectively. We may even unify the four forces into a single model – already scientists have assembled three “pieces of the plate” into one big picture, and they’re working on breaking down atoms into smaller and smaller pieces to try and better understand how these pieces “broke” by understanding how they relate to each other, and maybe someday we can even understand what happened to create that break.

Then again, whenever scientists think they have something almost fully explained, someone like Kurt Gödel usually shows up to remind everybody that we don’t (or even can’t) know quite as much as we think we can. But we can always increase and improve our understanding, and the more we do, the more we can marvel at both how incredibly elegant and vast the universe can be and at the ingenuity and dedication of those scientists who help us understand it.

Reading:

• Galaxies: Inside the Universe’s Star Cities by David J. Eicher
• The Feynman Lectures on Physics (https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/)
• On the Origin of Time by Thomas Hertog
• Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos by Michio Kaku
• The Poincaré Conjecture by Donal O’Shea
• Elements of Mathematics: From Euclid to Gödel by John Stillwell

I just have to say, because I am aware and I want to make sure you are as well: We in America in 2025 live in a terrible time of death and ignorance, of cruelty and racism masquerading as Christianity, of a crowd of very misled if not actually evil people trying to undo decades of what most of us really hoped was progress. Please vote against Republicans, if they ever let us again, because at a time when climate change and inequality are more threatening than ever, they’re going the wrong way.

Whew. That said, I want to be writing more things for this website. I used to write here daily, but I’ve decided daily is a bit too often for me at this point. So I’m going to try putting something up weekly. Here’s a few interesting things I’ve learned about lately.

1. I am fascinated by this company called Chase Bliss. They make really beautiful and apparently well-built guitar pedals (which I am nurturing a latent obsession with — despite playing guitar for the better part of a decade, I am only now realizing just how vast and wild the universe of things you can plug your guitar into is), which I assume sound great. They’re all a bit too expensive for my skill level.
   
   But also, their story is pretty incredible — Wikipedia says that the founder named the company after a brother who was killed by a drunk driver. They started out building guitar pedals by hand (!) but it sounds like their process has really advanced.
   
   Advanced so far, in fact, that they’re now building up some interesting partnerships. I first heard about the company when they acquired another group called Chompi Club, so named because they had a very successful Kickstarter to create a music creation and editing device called Chompi. It’s also a bit too expensive for me, and you can tell just by looking at it that it’s a bit complex if you’re not used to those types of things. But what a charming device, clearly made by incredibly charming people, who have now made a charming deal to work with Chase Bliss.
   
   Yesterday, Chase Bliss announced another partnership — they’ve been working with yet another little audio device company called Analogman, which is essentially a guy who also makes guitar pedals, many of them by hand. Analogman, or Mike, as his real first name goes, makes a fairly lauded (and also charming) device called the King of Tone, which is a guitar pedal that, in layman’s terms, you plug your electric guitar in, and make your wah-wahs sound like ratch-ratch, or whatever you want to do. The King of Tone is slow to make, however, meaning there’s a long waitlist for the pedal, and it sells for four figures online.
   
   Anyway, Chase Bliss announced yesterday that the company has teamed up with Analogman to basically take his very powerful, very expensive and hard to make pedal, leave it as is, and allow them to make a similar pedal (called Brothers AM, which I admit is a strange name but which I promise has a good explanation that I won’t get into here) that’s much cheaper and connects up to some really powerful control elements. The guitar pedal vloggers are calling it “the pedal collab of the century,” but if you watch the mini-documentary that Chase Bliss made and released about it, you can see the truth: This is just the guy behind Chase Bliss connecting and hanging out with the guy behind Analogman putting their extensive knowledge of and experience with guitar pedals into action to make something that’s going to benefit everybody. Everybody who buys their pedals, I guess, but you can’t fault a company for serving its customers.
   
   I love that. That’s how business should be — not a scam or a shakedown, but two people agreeing to make cool things, and especially to make them more accessible and expansive. I’m really impressed by the thinking and work behind Chase Bliss — it’s inspiring. And clearly they’re having a great time doing it.
   
   
2. I found a book at a used bookstore recently that is basically a tour guide for a bunch of English pubs. I like looking at it — there are some fun, very specific pictures of long-standing pubs and the country lanes that they have stood next to since the times of the Romans, and I like going through it and pretending I’m touring pubs in the backcountry of the UK.
   
   But other than becoming literarily familiar with the dingy alehouses of Britain, I also learned a few things about pubs, and specifically about pub names.
   
   The Hollybush is one of the original pub names in England, the book suggests, and it reminded me of how humans literally have a section of their brains designed for 2D mapping — early humans (and perhaps late ones as well) understood the world in terms of locations rather than names. Danger was “by the tree” or “by the lake” and the holly bush was probably near to home, but not at it. A perfect place to hang out and drink a bit.
   
   I also learned that the “Goat and Compasses” was another common name — poking fun at the Puritans walking around saying “God encompass us.”
   
   As history has moved on, pub names have adapted — originally, there were Lions and Horses and Eagles and Bear’s Heads. Then there were Pope’s Heads, which the book says “became King’s Heads almost overnight” when Henry VIII decided he didn’t want to deal with the church telling him who he was married to any more.
   
   Then as time went on there were lots of pubs named after saints (“the George” is common, apparently), but also The Green Man (which is a reference to a pagan spirit) still hangs over a lot of pub doors there. Once we hit the current century, there were pubs named after Soldiers. The Railroadman and the Coach and Horses, when those things became ubiquitous.
   
   The name I liked the most was a place called “The Three Chimneys,” which has stood for 600 years, so named not for any amount of smokestacks on it, but because it stood at the intersection of three country lanes, which served as a boundary for French POWs from the Seven Years’ War who were basically given the lay of the land to move about. The French were told not to go any farther than the “trois chemins” — the three lanes — and apparently thus the name.
   
   
3. Another discovery while I’ve been studying music: Hertz is a measurement of cycles per second — if a note is 220 Hertz (Hz), then we hear it as an A. A3, to be precise — the A in the third octave of the MIDI note structure. Interestingly, if you double that frequency to 440 Hz, you get A4 — the A an octave above. So the notes on a piano don’t go up in frequency linearly (as in 1,2,3,4, which most people probably assume, as the keys are in an even line on the piano). They go up in frequency exponentially (2,4,8,16 and so on). Each note’s higher octave is twice as many Hz as the previous. When you go up one key down in the bass, you’re only going up a few Hz at a time, but when you go up a key on the left side, you’re sometimes jumping up hundreds of extra cycles per second. Cycles per second of whatever’s vibrating to make that noise — a piano wire, a guitar string, the little membranes in your Airpods vibrating the air that your ear picks up.
   
   None of that is the interesting part about this. The interesting part is that even though humans have used different frequencies to make rhythms and melodies probably since before we could talk, the Hertz unit is named after Henrich Hertz, who studied electromagnetism in the 1890s. He was studying the fields and cycles of current around wires and magnets, and needed a way to describe frequency. His measurement was internationally adopted by electricians in 1935, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that science essentially agreed that Hertz would mean “cycles per second.”
   
   That’s fascinating to me — that music has flowed around us as long as the human race has existed, but only since the 1970s have we been able to accurately describe what makes an A sound like an A.
   
   And don’t get me started on why we call the note an A, but already this post has run too long. I’ll try to be back next week.

These are some photos I’ve taken recently.

Another entry from the previous mikeschramm.com. I thought I was pretty clever when I wrote this back in 2004 or so.

Malcolm and the Scots rejoice at having found the head of their King, Macbeth. They hold it up! “Thanks to each one and to all at once” for this great effort, says Malcolm.

They carry it back to Macbeth’s body and resurrect him, pull their swords out of Macbeth’s body, pick up a bunch of tree branches and run back to Birnam Wood.

Macduff seems confused and angry, despite the victory. And he’s obsessed with born women for some reason. He yells a bit, but at the sound of trumpets, he runs away.

The resurrection has downsides. Macbeth is heartbroken and moans and whines about “tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow” and life being a brief candle until one of his servants comes in to tell him that Lady Macbeth has died. Suddenly, Macbeth feels much better.

Meanwhile, Macduff and his men arrive at Birnam Wood and reattach the branches to the trees.

Lady Macduff wakes up and finds out she is no longer dead. Still, she’s been through some trouble — she keeps talking about blood and spots. Macduff, having restored Birnam Wood, heads back to England just in time to find his son and wife meeting with a few murderers. Apparently they had stopped by a moment ago and accidentally left their knives sitting in Macduff’s son and wife. They retrive their weapons, apologize, and head home. Macduff, his Lady, and Junior enjoy some witty banter.

Macbeth meets with the Witches, who tell him that not only will he someday (in a future that’s now in the past) be killed by “no born woman of man,” but also that he won’t be dead until Birnam Wood moves to Dunsinane Hill.

“Suits me,” thinks Macbeth, feeling much better. “They just put it back a moment ago.”

He goes back to meet with Lady Macbeth and they chat for a bit. Lady Macbeth quickly brings in a banquet, and Macbeth seems pretty freaked out until the ghost of Banquo shows up. Macbeth asks if anyone else can see him, and they all say no, which isn’t surprising because Banquo’s ghost promptly disappears, leaving them to enjoy their meal. Macbeth gets much happier, starts to have a little fun at his coronation, and everyone has a grand old time.

Fleance and Banquo meet up with the murderers and give them back their knives, which they appear to have dropped in Banquo earlier. Banquo and Fleance, completely healthy, go back to the stables, and spend a wonderful day riding horses.

Earlier that morning, everyone’s going crazy over the killing of the King, Duncan. Macduff, specifically, is running around screaming how horrible it is. Macbeth tries to shut him up, but he just won’t stop, so the devil’s porter decides to shut both him and Lennox out of the castle for the night.

Lady Macbeth and Macbeth are also unsettled over the killing of the king, especially because every time they run water over their hands, blood keeps showing up on them. Finally, Macbeth decides to put a stop to it, and goes back into Duncan’s room. When he emerges, he’s holding a knife, the blood is gone, and Duncan is alive again. The king has returned!

After Macbeth is finished, he and Lady spent the better part of a night arguing. She questions his manhood, calling him “too full of the kindness of human milk.” Macbeth doesn’t have to put up with this — in the past few days, he’s been killed, resurrected, and given up the crown, along with saving both Banquo and Duncan’s lives. He’s a real hero!

He finds himself wishing his wife would go insane again, until he decides it’s probably better if he and Banquo take a little vacation to Duncan’s castle.

On the way, they’re met by the Witches, who say that Macbeth will soon be Glamis, Cawdor, and King of the Scots. “Been there, done that,” thinks Macbeth, who beckons Banquo and sprints away to go fight some wars (which he likes better anyway, to be honest). The Witches are left by themselves on the dark and lonely heath, blabbering about Hecate and her spirits.

Back at Duncan’s castle, Macbeth is honored for his prowess on the battlefield. Duncan goes on and on about what a great guy Macbeth is. He forgets to mention that he saved his life, but Macbeth is feeling better than he ever has and doesn’t worry about it. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow was yesterday, after all.

Macbeth decides a soldier’s life is the place for him, and heads back to the battlefield to do some heroics, away from Lady Macbeth, Macduff, Duncan, and pretty much all of Scotland. He sees the Witches on his way back, and gets out of there before they can make any more predictions. The play ends with the Witches onstage by themselves, chanting that “foul is fair and fair is foul.”

Back in the early days of mikeschramm.com, I would write little pieces here almost every day. This was one of them, a fun little flake of an idea that I turned into something fun at the time (and still relevant, I think, if a little precocious). This is a real album, and these song titles are real. This first showed up on my site on December 16, 2004, and it’s notable to me both because I still like it, and because it got a link on the old Defamer, one of the best sites in the badly mistreated (in my opinion) Gawker network.

ME: Lindsay, how are you? I wanted to chat with you about something, if I could.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Speak.

ME: Of course, of course. You don’t have to be so pushy about it. Ever since that remake of The Parent Trap, I figured you were a pretty nice, head on shoulders kind of girl. But then, of course, the rumors started…

LINDSAY LOHAN: Rumors?

ME: Yeah, you know. That you’re a crazy drinker, that you’re hanging out with Colin Farrell, that you went to a clinic, that you were hooked up with Fez for a while.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Over!

ME: Oh, right, sure — that’s finished now. But still, you have to admit that you’ve got your issues. Which makes me wonder, Lindsay, why America seems to be so ga-ga over you. Just today, I was at work, and some woman saw you on the cover of Entertainment Weekly naked but for stockings, and she went crazy. She was fed up with you– she gestured wildly right at me, and yelled “She”s only 18!” as if I had put you on that cover myself, wanting to rip you from your innocent childhood.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Something I never had.

ME: Well, sure, that’s a factor– you never really did have a childhood. Maybe it’s because you were a child star that you seem so hooked on fame. What other reason do you have for going on SNL this past weekend just to remind everyone that your breasts are real, or mention in every interview you have that drinking illegally in clubs at 18 “isn’t a big deal”? Maybe you’re just a little out of touch.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Disconnected?

ME: Right, disconnected. But I think the truth is more complex than that, Lindsay. The truth is, America wants it both ways. That woman went crazy because she was outraged that you were being made a sex object even though you’re underage. But while I’m sure plenty of guys are attracted to you (no straight guy will ever call a movie star redhead unattractive), I’m not so sure that’s why you’re popular. “Mean Girls,” though smartly written, wasn’t exactly a guy’s kind of movie, nor was “Confessions of a Drama Queen,” And I highly doubt that many red-blooded straight males are out there this week picking up your album “Speak.”

LINDSAY LOHAN: Nobody ’til you.

ME: No, I didn’t buy it either — I just copied the song titles off of it. But my point, Lindsay, is that I think America wants it both ways. They want a hot sexy star to idolize and put in their movies and live it up like they can’t. And on the other hand, they also want to be shocked that you’re naked on magazine covers and gossip about your breasts and laugh at you in the tabloids.

LINDSAY LOHAN: Anything but me!

ME: No, Lindsay, they want to laugh at you. They want you to be better than them, and yet they want to feel better than you. And, while you or other stars your age may disagree, that’s too much pressure to put on anybody that young. That’s what will cause you to party all night after working all day, or show up in weird places talking about things you have no right to. Frankly, you’re being used, and because you get in all the clubs for free and you get paid plenty of money, you probably don’t even understand that that’s true.

Of course, even if you figured it out, and decided to move in either direction– towards a Britney Spears kind of tabloid crazy, or a Mandy Moore kind of psuedo legitimacy, the public would realize that you’re not playing into their plan, and drop you off the magazine covers and charts. But that won’t happen, will it, Lindsay? Because where have your parents and managers told you you want to be on the charts?

LINDSAY LOHAN: First.

ME: That’s right. They’ve made you do anything you can, just so they can be in the shadow of your fame, and yet you’re paying for America’s (and their) needs. It’s a shame, Lindsay, it really is, and I only hope that you make it out of there with your mind (and your dignity) intact.

LINDSAY LOHAN: The very last moment in time.

ME: Oh, do you have to go? What is it, the new Herbie the Love Bug movie? Ok, Lindsay, I’ll let you go. Just know that you’re being pulled in two different directions at once, and if you don’t settle down and get your head on straight, you’re going to end up in even more rehab. Stay cool, girl. Stay cool.

I originally wrote this for Joystiq, and published it back on May 31, 2012. My enthusiasm for the game was fairly controversial at the time — Diablo 3 suffered from server issues, and a lot of people had a problem with the in-game Auction House (which basically connected a real-life currency value to each procedural item in the game). I stand by my original opinions, though, and Diablo 3 has sold over 30 million copies across lots of platforms.

Hack-and-slash action RPGs, pioneered by Blizzard’s Diablo, are essentially slot machines. You click the mouse, and every time you do there’s a chance you’ll get the loot you want. Yes, the trappings of role-playing and combat mechanics are there, weaker in some cases and stronger in others, but in terms of brain chemistry you’re playing for the jackpot.

As anyone who’s been to Vegas will tell you, there are different kinds of slot machines. There’s the rickety old unit sitting in the gas station near the airport. And there’s the junky Jokers Wild machines blinking and chirping in that one casino downtown, where the air smells too much like your grandmother’s bathroom.

And then there are the machines in that one room in the Bellagio, where velvet seats wait underneath crystal chandeliers. That’s where the shahs from Dubai come to play with thousand dollar tokens, where pretty ladies serve you drinks as you play, and where a private concierge will happily help you order up a steak, buy a Brooks Brothers suit, or get you anything else you might want. Blizzard’s Diablo 3 is that Bellagio room, high stakes and luxurious and ready to cater to your every dungeon crawler need.

The genius of Diablo 3 is in the pacing. While we haven’t seen a sequel to Diablo 2 in nearly thirteen years, Blizzard has been iterating on this type of gameplay all that time with World of Warcraft. And all that experience has given the developers an incredible sense of what players want and will do at any given moment.

At its core, Diablo 3 is a series of combat encounters and, when you realize just how carefully it’s put together, Blizzard’s expertise is staggering. Again and again, the pattern shows up: You see one wandering enemy, or a glimpse of light ahead, or a small glowing object you can interact with on the ground. You click to attack, or move forward, or interact. Suddenly, the enemy has friends, or that light opens up into a room full of bad guys, or that object spawns four huge creatures, who would just love to crush you.

You hammer away with your various weapons and abilities, your health constantly falling and being caught just perfectly by a well-timed potion or a random health globe, and just as you think you’re overwhelmed the tide turns, and enemies start dropping. After you pick off the last of the bad guys, what’s left is a small area scattered with gold and loot of various qualities. You grab them, wander away for a bit, and then notice, just offscreen, another pool of light, or a wandering enemy, and the whole process begins again.

This pacing works perfectly throughout a number of environments, and while, yes, all you’re doing is clicking and popping one of six abilities when needed, it never once gets old. That glimpse of what’s ahead never fails to push you forward, that triumph of winning in battle always excites, and that loot, that sweet loot, always falls right into your pack with satisfaction.

Diablo 2 was famous for its talent trees – long lists of class-based abilities into which you could put points – and that idea has spun off into countless other games (including World of Warcraft). But Diablo 3 smartly reduces basic ability choices into just six options, which themselves are unlocked as you level up.

Once fully open, the system is just as complex as the Diablo 2-style talent trees, but the pace of leveling and unlocking makes everything much easier to understand. You have one skill at level 1, at level 2 another one opens up, and as you level up abilities unlock just as quickly as you can learn how to make effective use of them. Later in the game, switching abilities out (which you can do whenever out of combat) becomes paramount: For crowds, you’ll switch to AoE, and bosses will have you picking single-target skills. The fact that you can easily and quickly narrow down exactly what you need from thousands of ability and rune combinations speaks to how powerful this new system is.

And no matter how you choose your abilities, using them is exhilarating fun. All of the particle effects and crashing and bashing sounds are just syntactic sugar on a loot-based slot machine, but it’s delicious. Blizzard’s legendary polish is brought to bear all the way through the game. Enemies animate beautifully, spells are clear and gorgeous even with four players on screen at a time, and, oh boy, the sounds! My Barbarian’s bash sounded almost like a cannon shot whenever I landed a mace right on the crown of a drooly demon’s head. The voice acting drips with charm as well, and lootable audio log items have you listening to stories almost the whole time.

For all of the hack-and-slash RPGs out there, no one has ever done the constant, grindy dungeon crawling battle as well as Blizzard has here. One segment in Act 3, called Rakki’s Crossing, is the most memorable action RPG battle sequence in recent memory. I had my Barbarian slicing through demons for a good twenty minutes, all while I laughed in glee at the carnage on the screen. Only at one point in Act 2’s wide open desert landscape does exploration slow the pace down a little too much for my liking. Throughout the rest of all four acts, it’s nothing but pure, glorious dungeon crawling.

There are four difficulty levels after Normal, and the game is designed to take one character through at least twice – the really good gear only starts to appear at the end of Normal, and some runes and skills don’t even open up until Nightmare. There are five classes that all play differently as well, from the revolting pets of the Witch Doctor to the dark ranged attacks of the Demon Hunter.

The game’s famously been attacked for requiring an Internet connection to play. Once you log in past Error 37 (an issue that’s hard to forgive, but forgivable nonetheless), you can see why that connection is there: Blizzard has not only closely integrated the game with an online auction house, but the social system is deep and powerful as well. You can see where your friends are playing at any time, and jump in or out with them on demand. Public games are easy to find and join, and every player only sees their own drops, so there’s never any fighting over loot. Quests are the only place where the social connection can fall apart: Entering someone else’s game puts you on their quest in the story, which can be confusing when you return to your own. But the out-of-game menus can easily let you go back to whatever you’d like to play.

The weakest part of Diablo 3 is the story. Again, Blizzard has learned a lot about storytelling from World of Warcraft, and it has worked hard to draw characters in this game with clear and interesting lines. The Followers (more or less required for single-player) each have their own memorable personalities, provide some excellent chuckles, and do a great job of pointing out more loot, or just filling out the environment (my Templar told me once that the ground in one demonic sanctum “yields like flesh,” providing quite a mental image).

Though Blizzard leaps into these personalities with style, it fumbles the landing. The game’s plot turns are almost comedically telegraphed (as World of Warcraft players know, anytime there’s a lot of power around someone will go mad with it), and the ending, at least to Normal mode, is as abrupt as a pop-up screen that tells you the game is over. The setting of the game is suitably epic, and there’s a lot of great characters to care about here, but most of them are forgotten by the the time the credits roll.

Of course, there’s undoubtedly more content coming. PvP content wasn’t included at launch, but is scheduled to show up in a free patch. And the real-money auction house (which may end up being the real legacy of Diablo 3) has been delayed past not only launch, but its planned debut date as well. There is already an in-game currency auction house up and running, but Blizzard wants to make sure the servers will stay up before real money starts getting passed around. If its current efforts to keep the game up are any indication, it may be a while.

Even without those features, however, Diablo 3 is a masterpiece. It advances the classic form of Diablo 2 past the World of Warcraft era, including its own versions of mechanics like crafting and the Auction House that worked so well in Blizzard’s MMO. At the same time, it remains Diablo – Torchlight added a pet that will sell items for you, among other innovations, but Blizzard has remained characteristically traditional on that. You go out, you kill monsters and pick up loot, you return to town to buy, sell, and upgrade. Rinse and repeat, forever and ever, amen.

These days, dungeon crawlers are everywhere – you can play them on any console, any operating system, any smartphone you can find. They’re like slot machines in Vegas: You’ll find tons of them, and all of them will give you that addictive rush of killing bad guys and leveling up, of dropping the coin and pulling the lever. With Diablo 3, however, Blizzard’s running the best room in town.

[Five Stars]

I wrote this to be the very first post on Massively, then a brand new site in the Weblogs Inc. network (then owned by AOL). First published on November 2, 2007.

This is it. The design is in place, our bloggers are trained and at the ready, and the password has been lifted from the site. Our brand new blog, Massively, is now live and ready for your perusal, your comments, your tips, and your eyeballs. Here, you’ll find breaking news about MMO games both upcoming and established, insightful and wisecracking commentary about your favorite worlds, tips on how to get all your characters in all those universes the best they can be, and the high level of quality you’ve come to expect from WoW Insider, Second Life Insider, Joystiq and the Fanboy network. This is Massively, and welcome to it.

“But wait,” you say, “we’ve already got tons of MMO sites out there. I’ve got sites I read for commentary, and sites I read for news. I’ve got dev blogs, community forums, and even sites that sift community forums for me. There are guide sites that have their own guide sites, and everybody and his cousin is already blogging about MMO videogames. Why do we need one more MMO blog?”

The answer is: because this is the place where all of those things come together, in one location; because of our commitment to producing top-notch original features; and because our incredibly talented staff of writers have spent as much time leveling their word-smithing skills as they have spent leveling characters in the virtual worlds we’re going to be covering.

We’ve got every MMO you play covered, from Age of Conan to World of Warcraft, and even about 400 you don’t (seriously, does anyone even play Planetside anymore? We hope all three of you will enjoy our posts about it). If you’ve ever read WoW Insider, we’re like “WoW Insider for more MMOs than you possibly have time to play.” If you’ve ever read Joystiq, we’re like “Joystiq for MMOs,” but even better, because Joystiq doesn’t do strategies and tips, and baby, we do.

And, of course, we’re a blog — and that means you as readers help us make the site a great place to go to for intelligent discussion about MMOs. We’re aiming to elevate the community, to spotlight the incredible culture that massively multiplayer games are producing, and to show off how talented and creative the fanbase is. Massively is your place to voice and share your opinions about the hottest topics in online gaming today.

We’re also working with some of the most successful developers in the business to bring you exclusives and interviews on some of your favorite games. Plus, there’s always the schwag — we’re going to kick off this site with a whopping two weeks full of contests. If you stick around and leave some comments, you’ll have the chance to win a metric ton of prizes, including beta keys, games, game time cards, special in-game items, game merch, an iPod, a high end video card, and even a 24-inch flatscreen monitor. Everything that developers give to us, we give away to you — it’s policy.

And we also get to break some rules. We’ve escalated the gold ad issue up the ladder to the suits who’ve never even heard of World of Warcraft and convinced them to let us remove the Google AdSense ads that, no matter how much we blacklist, keep turning up new power-leveling and gold selling ads. We’re taking a stand against gold ads and we hope you’ll support us by… reading us!

We’ve assembled an appropriately massive team of some of the best MMO writers out there, and we’re going to go in-depth, every day, on all the games and news you care about, and then some. So get involved — drop us a tip on what you think of the site, or a newsworthy item you want us to cover. Get involved in the discussions in the comments — if you’ve visited our other sites you’ll recognize that your login works just like it does with all the other Blogsmith-powered Joystiq network sites. If you’re new to the family, just leave a comment and click on your name to access your profile and change your custom avatar.

Add us to your RSS feeds or bookmarks folder, not only because you’ve definitely got to come back and check out our contests in the next week (seriously, we’re giving away another Murloc costume from BlizzCon!), but because we’re going to be hitting hard with non-stop, in-depth coverage of your favorite games.

Welcome to Massively!

This is probably my favorite piece that I wrote on the original mikeschramm.com website. Originally published back on February 14, 2005.

Godzilla was in America, and depressed.

His latest movie had opened and crashed within a weekend, and he had become the big, green laughingstock of Hollywood.

Godzilla sat in his hotel room and watched reruns of Miami Vice and The Commish and drank vodka until he passed out. In the morning, he would wake up, shower, and do it all over again.

Sometimes he would wander out to get something to eat at this diner down the road.

People would shout things at him as they passed.

“You suck, Godzilla!” is what they would say.

Sometimes they would throw things at him, sticks and beer bottles that they found on the side of the road.

And sometimes, they would stick their arms out in front and waddle back and forth slowly and say things like, “I’m Godzilla! Look at me! I’m Godzilla and I suck!”

Out of all the things they did, this hurt Godzilla the most.

At the diner, the waitress wasn’t ever friendly to him, and always brought his food late, and put it down without saying anything. Godzilla would pay his check and leave without talking to anyone. He heard snickers and whispers as he walked by the other patrons.

“‘Zilla, baby,” said his American agent, a fat man named Harvey (Godzilla didn’t know if it was his first name or his last name).

“‘Zilla,” he would say, “I gotta say– things don’t look good. I want to give it to you up front, I think you’re talented– you’ve got name recognition, and that’s good. But there isn’t a lot of call for big green lizards right now. Especially one that’s.. uh… iffy at the box office.”

Godzilla would sigh. Godzilla sighed a lot when he talked to Harvey.

“‘Zilla,” Harvey would say, “I’ll call you when something comes. I mean, don’t wait up or nothing. But I’ll call.” Godzilla sighed and hung the phone up, then opened another bottle of vodka.

Something was missing, he thought as he swallowed a gulp and the familiar warmth spread through his throat, stomach, tail, and scales.

Something was missing, and he didn’t know what it was.

One morning, he woke up and it was dark outside. It was probably evening, actually– he lost track of time, none of it ever mattered. He decided to walk to the diner and try to get some coffee and, maybe, perspective.

He walked down the street, which was empty.

It must have been very late at night. He made it to the diner, and looked in the lit windows, saw the ugly guy behind the bar that always stared at him, saw the mean waitress.

He decided maybe going to the diner wasn’t what he needed. But he didn’t want to go back to the hotel.

So Godzilla walked on, through the streets of Los Angeles. He walked past the video stores and all night doughnut shops and clubs.

He walked towards the beach, past the surf shops and clothing boutiques, all closed up, lifeless, and dark in the deep of night. He made it to the beach, and walked across the sidewalk, over the grass, out onto the sand.

Godzilla stopped and looked at the water, the sand, the sea, the sky.

The water splashed against the grains he stood in, and he dug in deeper to the solid wetness beneath him. Something is missing, he thought. Something I have to find. And Godzilla took a step toward the water.

And then another and another, until he was running through the tide, and jumped in and swam.

He swam away from the beach and America, from his terrible movie and the jerks who made fun of him and the man named Harvey who always told him things didn’t look good. Godzilla swam.

He swam for hours and then for hours more. The sun rose behind him, and he swam until it set in front of him. It looked beautiful, the red sky and clouds reflected in the water.

Godzilla knew this was right, that what he wanted was this way. He swam some more.

And then, maybe three or four days later, he saw something on the horizon.

It was a series of bumps rising from the line between the sea and the sky.

He swam harder and faster, and the bumps grew and defined themselves, turned into pillars, with shorter pillars around them.

He swam closer, and the pillars grew lights and shapes. They were buildings.

Godzilla swam closer.

It was Tokyo.

He reached shore, and the Japanese went crazy.

They didn’t throw bottles at him or make fun of him.

Instead, they were terrified.

Old men and schoolgirls pointed and ran around and screamed things like, “Gojira! Iz tan poko Gojira! AAAAAHHH!!”

Godzilla roared.

He knocked over a few buildings, stepped on some Hondas. He even knocked out a few planes with his radioactive breath.

And, from one of his lizard eyes, a tiny tear fell.

It was a tear of happiness.

Godzilla was home, and he had found love.