"One of my favorite paintings is "The Lacemaker." Johannes Vermeer painted a loving, accurate, and detailed rendition of a girl making lace. Vermeer celebrated real people doing ordinary things; he offered the radical idea that you didn't have to be special or important or magical or legendary to worth being painted or thought about or remembered. So it turns out there are two ways of explaining history. We can be like Geoffrey of Monmouth or the early Romans and invent these magical, wondrous, brilliant people who gave everything to us: a wizard made Stonehenge all by himself, a man called Romulus invented Rome out of whole cloth and took part in every major historical event required to fulfill his amazing design, Don Bluth made "Dragon's Lair." Or we could be like Vermeer: a bunch of ordinary everyday people built Stonehenge just by working together and putting time and effort into it, a bunch of ordinary people make video games by working together very hard for hours and hours and hours and days and years to make it, a bunch of regular, ordinary people built Rome over the span of a very long time, contributing to what would later be remembered as the exploits of one man. This way is nowhere near as magical as the one we like to imagine put our world together. The truth is often very mundane. But maybe that's okay."