In one of the Discworld books, Terry Pratchett asserts the theory that there are only a small number of real people in the world, and the many people you meet are merely duplicates; that’s why you seem to meet the same kinds of people over and over again. I was reminded of this phenomenon by a string of tweets by Anne Theirault being shared around on Tumblr. They begin with her observation of a couple at the next table who seem to be on a coffee date that is not going well.
(Click to embiggen)She proceeds to live tweet the conversation she is overhearing. The guy talks about himself constantly, without ever asking his date about herself. Any time she volunteers something about herself, he has to turn it into something about him. Example, she mentions she likes to cook, he tells her that she must taste this exotic sauce that he makes that a friend who is a chef says is great. And so on. Eventually the woman on the date fakes getting a text from her mother as an excuse to escape.
(Click to embiggen)A little later Anne tweeted about all the reactions she was getting. Specifically, that most of the men who responded asserted that she’s being unfairly mean to the guy and/or accusing her of making the whole thing up. While the overwhelming majority of women respond that they have been on exactly the same date.
The Tumblr post has been shared nearly 200,000 times as of this morning. I noticed that I was not the only queer guy by any means to share it and comment that we had also been on this exact date. Other people have added the observation that they know it’s true not just because they’ve been on a similar date themselves, but because they know dates like that happen every single day.
I noticed that a lot of people sharing it on Tumblr make the observation that this proves you should never date a writer (the guy describes himself as a writer and says a lot of very cringe-worthy stuff about writing). Which means that these people completely misunderstand. First, Anne Theirault, who live-tweeted the exchange, is herself a writer. That wasn’t the observation she was making. The guy isn’t cluelessly obnoxious and self-absorbed because he’s a writer. He’s cluelessly obnoxious and self-absorbed because he’s a guy.
When I reblogged the Tumblr post, I observed that I had been on that exactly date back in the 90s, and had to fake coming down sick in order to flee. I was the writer in the conversation. The other guy was a performance artist. But I’ve had the exact conversation (not in the context of a date) with guys who are in marketing, guys who are software engineers, guys who are car mechanics, guys who run their own businesses, et cetera. And even worse, I know that there have been conversations I’ve been in when I was the cluelessly self-absorbed guy who only wanted to talk about myself and never let the other person get a word in edgewise.
Guys are socialized to be that kind of person. We’re supposed to assert ourselves, and dominate conversations. If we don’t all have the requisite extroversion streak to dominate, we’ve at least all been socialized to expect that our needs are always important, that of course anything we are involved in is going to be interesting to other people—not just interesting, but exceptionally interesting, because everything we do is special and unique and better than what anyone else is doing. Guys are taught to be entitled. We’re also taught that it is our job to win people over to our side. To be competitive even in a conversation. We’re taught that a date isn’t a chance to get to know another person, a date is an opportunity to conquer and take the other person as a prize.
Some of the specific assertions that Anne tweeted that the guy makes about how incredibly hard writing is, and how he has to struggle with his inner demons to write, even those are not something that is common to writers nor restricted to writers. The performance artist disaster of a date spent a lot of time explaining to me how very very hard it was to do what he did, how he had to dig into his worst childhood memories to infuse his performance pieces with meaning, and so on. It’s a product of the self-absorption and competitiveness. He was trying to impress me, to make me swoon over his great emotional depths and work ethic.
The only inner demons a writer needs to struggle with are Procrastination, Distraction, and the “But it’s not perfect yet!” urge. And those aren’t really demons. They are ordinary (and usually quite minor) imperfections. Our struggles aren’t exceptional. They are the same kinds of things that everybody struggles with.
Not all guys are like that all of the time. There are even some guys who are almost never like that. Some of us have realized we can be like that, that it isn’t good way to be, and we try not to let our arrogance bulldoze everyone else. I am also aware that there are even some gals who can be that way. Humans are not perfect.
Unfortunately, a lot of humans are imperfect in very similar ways.
Another in my series of posts recommending web comics:
Caterwall by Spain Fischer Caterwall is the story of Pax, who is the orphaned son of a knight who was the hero of the kingdom, and his best friend Gavin, who is the descendant of a line of seers. Pax is a young man who has a reputation for pulling pranks and telling lies, who gets exiled from the kingdom. Gavin joins him in exile. I like the story and really like the artwork. It’s just so cheerful and cute, even when grim things are happening. Caterwall is a graphic novel, the first 25 pages are available on the web site. The first book has recently been published and is available for purchase here.
I have recommended “Mr. Cow,” by Chuck Melville many times before. A clueless cow with Walter Cronkite dreams presides over a barnyard of a newsroom. But I need to update the recommendation because the comic has moved to a new site. The old Web Comics Nation site died without notice (literally), stranding several artists and leaving no way for them to post pointers from their old URLs to their new homes. Chuck has found Mr. Cow a new home on Comic Fury: mrcow.webcomic.ws. His other comics have also been moved to the new host: Champions of Katara and Felicia, Sorceress of Katara. If you like Mr. Cow, Felicia, or Flagstaff (the hero of Champions of Katara) you can support the artist by going to his Patreon Page. Also, can I interest you in a Mr. Cow Mug?
I’m a big fan of (and have previously recommended) “Deer Me,” by Sheryl Schopfer. This artist is also a friend. I have previously described this strip as: “Three roommates who couldn’t be more dissimilar while being surprisingly compatible.” Except in a recent story line Thomas has moved out! Eeek! After a storyline that took us back to the high school days of some of the characters, the storyline has returned to “the present day” where various consequences of the Thomas’s moving out are coming to pass. While checking the links, I realized that my older recommendations for this comic linked to a specific strip on the artist’s art blog, rather than the main comic URL (DeerMe.Net), and she’d moved her blog to a new host, so those links don’t work anymore. So, I’m updating and re-recommending. In any case, if you enjoy Deer Me, you can support the artist by going to her Patreon Page!
Some of the comics I’ve previously recommended:
And I love this impish girl thief with a tail and her reluctant undead sorcerer/bodyguard: “Unsounded,” by Ashley Cope.
The Young Protectors by Alex Wolfson begins when a young, closeted teen-age superhero who has just snuck into a gay bar for the first time is seen exiting said bar by a not-so-young, very experienced, very powerful, super-villain. Trouble, of course, ensues.
If you want to read a nice, long graphic-novel style story which recently published its conclusion, check-out the not quite accurately named, The Less Than Epic Adventures of T.J. and Amal by E.K. Weaver. I say inaccurate because I found their story quite epic (not to mention engaging, moving, surprising, fulfilling… I could go on). Some sections of the tale are Not Safe For Work, as they say, though she marks them clearly. The complete graphic novels are available for sale in both ebook and paper versions, by the way.
The folks at Queerty.Com have asked comedian Sam Kalidi to create a new meme each week for Queerty readers. This is this weeks. They want you to share it! (Click to embiggen)Yesterday’s Friday Links was epically longer than usual. There was just so much crazy news this last week!
Individuals like Tony Perkins and Bryan Fischer and organizations such as the National Organization for Marriage, the Family Research Council, or the American Family Association want a resistance against marriage equality… As if they are puppeteers, anti-gay organizations and personalities are pulling the strings, buoying the arrogance and recklessness of clerks and various other government officials and thereby manipulating them to refuse to carry out their duties… Anti-gay groups are attempting to manipulate us all into an unnecessary holy war in which they hope to reap the benefits of pointing and saying “see, we told you so.”
Related, there are a couple of stories making the rounds (particularly on the Facebook pages of your most conservative relatives and former classmates) that are trying to fan the same flames: Gay Man Sues Bible Publisher For $70M For Causing Him Distress, Turns Out He’s Not Crazy. While he isn’t crazy in that there are some big problems with Biblical translations, he filed the suit seven years ago and it was thrown out. The other one is partially true and current, but there is a very important detail being left out: Oregon bakers forced to pay $135,000 after sharing lesbian couple’s home address. So the fine isn’t for refusing to sell the cake, it’s for publishing private information of customers (who they refused) leading to so many death threats to the couple, the social services almost removed foster children from the home for fear that those loving Christians leaving the death threats might actually follow through.
Completely unrelated to all of that: one particular link in yesterday’s post caused one friend to stop reading and send me a message to tell me it stopped him from looking at the rest. It was a story about a particularly awful child abuse incident which I put under the heading “This Week in Heart-wrenching” because like any child abuse case it was heart-wrenching. This is not the first time someone has told me they wish I wouldn’t include bad news in the links.
I don’t want to get into a weird pedantic argument about what constitutes bad news, other than to say that each person who has made that request has also, at other times, commented on other links to things that someone would classify as bad news in ways indicating that they were glad I linked to it.
But I do want to talk a little bit about why I include links like that. One of the other links under the same heading was about efforts to identify the body of a dead child. I believe that as a human being (let alone a citizen), I have an obligation to that murdered child. She deserves to be buried with her name. She deserves to have law enforcement find out how she was murdered and at least attempt to bring her killers to justice. Both of those things require that she be identified. If I can increase the chances, no matter how little, by sharing the link to the artist’s reconstruction of her face, I think I should do it. That one, for me, is a no-brainer.
Also, literally no-brainer in that the reason both of those links ended up in Friday Links was because I saw the headline in my news aggregator, I clicked on it out of emotional reaction. Then I read the stories. They were both heart-wrenching, and I tapped the share link to send to my list for Friday Links as a totally visceral, emotional, non-rational surge of “Oh My Goodness! This is too horrible to be ignored!”
That’s how those sorts of stories get into the list.
For a long, long time sex advice columnist, gay rights activist, and Seattle gadfly Dan Savage has had a continuing feature on the blog of the local alternative weekly’s paper called “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father.” He started it because, when he and his husband adopted a baby 17-or-so years ago, they began being harassed by even more threats, hit-pieces in conservative news sources, and so forth by various anti-gay people. The charge that the reason queer couples shouldn’t be allowed to adopt, shouldn’t be allowed to have civil unions, and shouldn’t be allowed to marry is always couched in an argument that children can only properly and lovingly be raised by a pair of opposite-sex parents because reasons. The argument usually summed up as “every child deserves a mother and a father. So any time a story of a straight couple abusing (sometimes to the point of murdering) a child crossed his news feed, Dan would share it under the “Every Child Deserves a Mother and a Father” heading. His point being that the mere fact that the adults raising a child don’t have matching genitals never guarantees that the children will be loved and cared for.
This feature always drew its detractors, too. “You don’t have to share these horrible stories to make your point,” or “Don’t make it sound like you’re happy to have your point proven correct” et cetera. For a while in reaction to those comments, Dan started including links to charities such as The National Children’s Alliance or The Child Help Foundation, giving those of us who read the stories of the horrible abuse an option to do something to help. Which maybe I should do the next time one of these stories winds up ripping my heart out and making we want to share the story.
I didn’t include the story because I was trying to make a political statement. I included it because it was heart wrenching, because I think it is too horrible to be ignored. I can’t save either of those kids. Sharing the news won’t bring either one back. But pretending I don’t know about their deaths doesn’t do anything to prevent other cases like theirs, either.
I don’t have any clever conclusion to this digression. All I can say is that there is a National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453) that anyone can call if you suspect a child is in danger and you’re not sure who to notify. There is a lot of social pressure to hope for the best, to assume that the parent or significant other of the parent is just having a bad day. There is a fear of getting an innocent person in trouble. And there is an aversion to even thinking about the bad things that might be happening out of sight. All of those things contribute to cases like the sad one I linked to Friday.
So I share it as a reminder that there are awful people in this world who don’t always look awful. To make us mindful. To, maybe, encourage someone who has seen something like this, to call someone before the next child dies.
National Child Abuse Hotline (1-800-4-A-Child/1-800-422-4453)
It’s Friday! Because I took a vacation day Monday (therefore making the holiday weekend a four-day weekend) you would have expected this short week to be a bit of a romp. No, work was… well, one very disturbing thing and then a few more-than-usual chainsaws, plus the super hot weather and ongoing weirdness from a few homophobic relatives, leaving me exhausted and wrung out by the end. I am soooo glad the weekend is here. Even if I have activities scheduled both days.
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Republicans Are Too Angry About Gay Marriage: If the GOP wants to stay relevant, it has to become less hateful. There’s a big disagreement I have with the writer. He says that “fewer people are going to listen to those ideas if millions continue to believe that Republicans are intolerant of large swathes of Americans” which implies that Republicans aren’t actually intolerant, it’s merely a misperception. While I know some Republicans who aren’t, they are by far the minority–and that’s backed up by statistics, it isn’t just anecdotal.
The plague of angry white men: How racism, gun culture & toxic masculinity are poisoning America. I grew up in a very redneck family in very redneck communities, and I was taught: Guns are for hunting. Guns are for target shooting (so you can be good at hunting). Guns are not for shooting people! The only time I ever saw my paternal grandmater raise his hand to anyone was to deliver a slap up-side-the-head to one of my cousins when he pointed an unloaded rifle at his little brother. “You never point a gun at a person! Not as a joke! Not because you think it’s unloaded! Never!”
Winners and nominees of the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer each receive this pin, which is a star made of fountain pin nubs.This is another post in my journey of reading the Hugo nominated stories before casting my ballot. By this point I’ve gotten through most of the story categories. I’ve probably gone on a bit too long about some of them. I’m not going to do full reviews of everything in the two Dramatic Presentation categories. You won’t have to wade through a lot to get to the Campbell Award, where I spend most of the post.
The 2008 Hugo trophy handed out at Denvention 3, the 66th annual World Science Fiction convention held that year in Denver, Colorado, USA. Trophy designed by Lee Kuruganti. Photo by Cheryl Morgan. (Click to embiggen)This is another post in my journey of reading the Hugo nominated stories before casting my ballot. I have attempted to read all the nominees with an open mind, rather than cast a No Award vote for anything that had made it onto the ballot due to the bloc-voting scheme of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. The Short Story and Novella categories were extremely disappointing, while Novelette category contained one great story, one good, and the rest dreck. Fortunately the Graphic Story category was full of great stuff, but my renewed sense of hope was dashed by the bad stuff that made up the Related Work.
Today I’m reviewing nominees for Best Fan Writer. This is awarded to a person for work(s) published in fanzines, semiprozines, mailing lists, blogs, BBSs, and similar electronic fora. Work the person may have published in professional publications should not be considered when judging for this award.
The 2003 Hugo Trophies, presented at TorCon 3, the 61st annual World Science Fiction Convention held that year in Toronto, Canada. Trophy designed by Franklyn Johnson (Click to embiggen).This is another post in my journey of reading the Hugo nominated stories before casting my ballot. I have attempted to read all the nominees with an open mind, rather than cast a No Award vote for anything that had made it onto the ballot due to the bloc-voting scheme of the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies. The Short Story and Novella categories were extremely disappointing, while Novelette category contained one great story, one good, and the rest dreck. Fortunately the Graphic Story category was full of great stuff that renewed my sense of hope for this endeavor.
This time I’m reviewing the Best Related Work nominees. These are awarded to a work related to the field of science fiction, fantasy, or fandom, appearing for the first time during the previous calendar year or which has been substantially modified during the previous calendar year.
This is a sort of catch-all category, that frequently includes things like biographies of writers, artists, editors or others important to the field, or books about the making of a particular movie or TV series. It usually does not include anthologies, even though there is no Best Anthology category. Non-fiction collections (such as a collection of essays about a sci fi/fantasy related topic, or collections of literary criticism, et cetera) are eligible.
When I set my goals for this year, I pledged to continue the things I thought worked last year (which includes posting regular updates) and added some new things. It’s a new month, so here’s the next report!
MemeoGraphs.Com (Click to embiggen)So CatholicVote.Org, a political action organization that tries to portray itself as serious but is known far and wide as a haven for the most bigoted of wingnuts, put out a video depicting people who discriminate on the basis of their religious beliefs as victims. To call it ridiculous, melodramatic, ludicrous, or even batshit stupid would be an insult to actual bat guano.
MemeGraphs.Com posted a review pointing out that the video has received over 1 million views, far surpassing any previous video by the group by more that 800,000 views. Unfortunately, it’s also gotten 30,000 thumbs down and and even for YouTube a truly amazing number of negative comments. Here’s the best part of the MemeGraphs review:
The auteurs at Catholic Vote have created an instant classic Christian cinematic masterpiece to rival Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas. Not since National Organization for Marriage’s “Gathering Storm” of 2008 have we seen delusional hyperbole, paranoia and self-pity lifted to such delirious heights. Like an episode of The Bachelor or a Lindsey Lohan court appearance, Not Alone is both terrifying and impossible to look away from. This important piece of filmmaking will surely inspire countless imitators, but Not Alone is so earnest in its own clueless, privileged insensitivity that parody may be superfluous (see Poe’s Law). Still, I look forward to seeing what influence this motion picture exerts on Stephen Colbert and the creative staff at The Daily Show, Funny or Die and Saturday Night Live.
As always, the bigots are completely unaware for their own deeply tragic irony. One of the lines from their video lamenting the fact that they are no longer allowed to discriminate against gay people is, “No one should be looked down upon, no one should be suppressed or their views be suppressed.” Unless, of course, you’re a gay or lesbian or bisexual person, then you should be looked down upon, you should be told to keep your feelings to yourself, to hide your relationships, and most definitely not get any legal rights to visit your dying partner in the hospital or not be kicked out of your home by bigoted relatives when a partner becomes incapacitated. Then, of course, you should be suppressed, looked down upon, and told to stop complaining.
Soundly Awake made a nice and funny video assuring Catholic Vote that they’re not alone:
People claiming to speak for Catholics aren’t the only ones flipping out. Presidential hopeful (and Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee has doubled-down on his calls to “protect religious liberty” in an opinion piece for Fox News (which I will not directly link to it (here’s the Do Not Link link, if you don’t want to go to Fox News, If You Only News has a nice summary) where he vows to issue executive orders to protect hospitals, public schools, private business’ et cetera religious liberty to discriminate against gay people. Hospitals. Can’t you just feel the christian compassion?
Meanwhile Scott Walker, another clown with presidential aspirations, thinks that the reason we celebrate Independence Day is because we don’t want government. Except that’s completely wrong. Independence Day, and the Declaration of Independence, are about our right to form our own government. Which is a very different thing. His official campaign email also manages to mix up the 4th of July with Veteran’s Day and to make it all about america’s founding being about god. (Forgetting that important clause of the Treaty of Tripoli, “the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion” which was initiated by George Washington near the end of his last term in office, signed by Secretary of State John Marshall, submitted to the Senate by newly elected President John Adams, ratified by said Senate in a unanimous vote in the 7th of June, 1897, and affirmed in a signing statement by John Adams).
But enough of these people who don’t know what Independence Day is all about. Please enjoy this, one of my favorite songs from the musical, 1776:
It’s Friday! Although for some of us, yesterday was “virtual friday” since my office is closed today so I have a holiday. My husband doesn’t get the holiday until Monday. So I’m taking a vacation day Monday. Because the Founding Fathers would have wanted me to have a four-day weekend, right?
For those of you who are reading this in the U.S., happy Independence Day! If you’re in the UK you’d probably not like to talk about it any further. Everyone else: Happy Friday!
Anyway, here is a collection of some of the things that I ran across over the course of the week which struck me as worthy of being shared. Sorted into categories with headings so you can skip more easily:
Bristol Palin and the failure of abstinence. This is also not snark – it’s about the very serious issue of teaching kids in a way that give them the real tools they need to protect their health, not ruin their lives, and maybe have a happy sex life with the person they love.
Font Folly 