Temple in the Sky ⛪

Greetings human 🤖. Welcome to Tuesday! It’s that day when you get the Robot Skidmore electronic mail newsletter in your internet inbox. This week’s email is all about living in space around the earth.

What I’m Writing

My new story Temple in the Sky is coming along well. I’ve got a basic outline in shape, and the characters are defined. I’ve also done a lot of preliminary research. More on that later. This week is all about word count. I’ve got to get words on paper. Feel free to send words of encouragement.

What I’m Learning

So many great learnings this week.

If you’re curious about cryptocurrency and NFT’s this breakdown on YouTube is fantastic. It goes over the many shortcomings of these novel technologies and explains them in an easy-to-understand manner. I’d highly recommend it even though it’s 2+ hours long.

This week, I spent a lot of my time researching orbital habitats since that’s where my next story takes place.
- This one talks about orbital habitats in general.
- This one is about a specific type of habitat called an O’Neill Cylinder. Which is one of the more plausible space habitats that can provide earth-like gravity.

I learned some interesting things about Latter-day Saint temple construction as well.
- This video is a virtual tour of the Rome, Italy temple given by two apostles.
- This one talks about the actual physical construction process behind building a temple.

What I’m Reading

I just finished Redemption Ark today. Man, the world the author creates is vast and spans so much time. This book is where we get the first glimpse into the galactic conflict underpinning the whole series—fascinating stuff. I won’t spoil it for you, but you should definitely go and read it.

I enjoy seeing imperfect characters placed in impossible situations and seeing how they handled it. I think it makes for interesting reading. There is a lot of that in this book.

I’ve also been reading Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. You might recognize him for his groundbreaking work on the concept of flow states. It’s been a thorough scientific look into what we think of as creativity and how contributions are made to different fields.

One thing that stood out was how creativity only gets recognized in fields that have a centralized body of authority. So recognizing creativity in mathematics is much easier than something like creativity in parenting. I’ve heard way too many people in my life say that they don’t have a creative bone in their body, and it irks me every time I hear it.

Human beings are born to be creative. Sure, some of it can be conditioned out of us by our school or home environment. But everyone is creative in their own way, whether that’s a novel method of auto body repair or what have you.