Being Sick Is A Part-Time Job, Being In Chronic Pain Is A Suspicion.

When you’re a kid, it takes you a while to recognize that someone you love’s an addict. The addiction’s a quiet partner to your life together: the six-pack they brought on that day trip you remember so fondly. The prescription pill bottles that stood by your Uncle’s favorite couch, right next to the boots you loved to polish and his stack of Archie comic books. Feeling proud at being included in the grownup conversations when he didn’t shoo you away as he complained bitterly about having to justify his need for pain pills to this new goddamned doctor at the hospital.
It took me a long time to realize that my Uncle Tommy was an addict.
If anyone had a right to be an addict, it was Uncle Tommy.
Which is a weird thing to say, but Tommy wasn’t getting any better. He had hemophilia, which is genetic and can’t be cured. His blood didn’t clot. And that meant any internal bruise spread and grew and ate away at his cartilage. At the age of thirty, he had the arthritis of a ninety year-old man. By the time he was forty, you could hear his bones rubbing against each other. He leaned heavily on his crutches.
Constant, unending pain.
Oh, and he had HIV too, which he got from the blood transfusions in 1982 before they even really knew what AIDS was, and the drugs they gave him meant he threw up all the time.
Suck end of the genetic lottery, really.
But Tommy bore it as well as any man could. He was my favorite uncle, my best friend in high school, the man who introduced me to science fiction and rock and roll and fine cuisine. He lived right next door, and though he had his grumpy days, I could usually wander over any time kids had made me feel like shit at school and he’d talk some sense into me.
And he was an addict. I mean, yeah, he had constant, unending pain – but he was always quick to reach for the bottle. He liked his booze. It was a coping mechanism, yes, but it was also an escape.
Still. What he was escaping from suuuuucked.
And today, I see that the CDC has released new guidelines for opioid usage. There are twelve suggestions, and eleven of them are aimed squarely at people like my Uncle Tommy: folks in chronic, unending pain.
One of them suggests only giving three to seven days’ worth of pain pills at a time.
I get what they’re trying to do: the number of opioid overdoses and deaths has been skyrocketing as of late, and something needs to be done to manage it. Doctors are also too quick to prescribe massive dosages for people who don’t really need it – “Your twisted your ankle, have two weeks of pseudo-heroin” – which drives up addiction rates more. I’m thoroughly for limiting senseless addictions and preventing overdoses.
Still. For my Uncle Tommy, what these new guidelines would mean is that he’d have to go to the doctor every three to seven days to justify his prescriptions – which, though he may have leaned heavily on them, he did also need. And the doctors would be more skeptical of his need, because goddammit we don’t need any fucking addicts clogging up our system.
What would most likely happen is that a man who already had enough trouble with doctors for his hemophilia and his HIV and his arthritis would have even more battles with doctors, and even more time off work, all in the name of preventing the terrible, terrible stigma of addiction.
And let’s be honest: my Uncle had me, and my Mom, and my Gramma to take care of him. We’d drive him on bad days. We’d go to pick up his pills. But I imagine if Tommy was by himself at the end, a man in a motorized scooter, trying to bop on down to the drugstore every three days to get more pills, being in unimaginable pain whenever he couldn’t manage to get off the couch and his supply ran dry, and…
These guidelines seem cruel. They seem to look at people in constant pain and say, “Yes, you’re suffering, but it’s very important that you don’t become addicted. We’d rather you hurt than accidentally give pain pills to a faker.”
Being sick is often a part-time job, and one that you can’t call out sick to. You’re constantly reeducating doctors, justifying decades-long successful treatments to your insurance, limping on down to the pharmacy to discover that your prescription’s been denied. Getting proper medical treatment can be an additional ten hours a week when you’re already fucking exhausted.
And for me, I say, Jesus, if these people are anything like Tommy, fuck it. Give them the goddamned pills. They are in actual pain thanks to circumstances they had no control over, and America’s endless hand-wringing over “What if we enable drugs?” just leaves poor people like Tommy high and dry.
For me, yes, Tommy was an addict. But he also had real need buried in there, and part of the reason he was an addict is that the pills were the only time he could escape the effects of his joints slowly eroding. And there are thousands of people also in unending pain out there, and we’re literally saying to them, “Hey, we know your lives are a bureaucratic hell right now as you manage the paperwork and prescription from five or six doctors’ visits a month right now, but….
“We need you to do more. Because there’s these people who don’t really need the pills, you see – they’re just having fun – and we think it’s more important to stop them than to help you.”
I get the dangers of overdose. I get the dangers of addicting people needlessly. I think these guidelines are good for preventing some of that.
I just wish there were also guidelines that acknowledged Tommy’s needs. Guidelines that said, “Okay, yeah, this guy’s got enough on his plate right now, what can we do to stave off his pain that doesn’t lend itself to overdosing?” Guidelines that said, “Look, if we have to choose between handing pain pills to fakers and not handing pain pills to people who desperately need it, let’s err on the side of getting pain relief to people who need it.”
And I don’t see that. Not yet.

Boring Games

So my daughter loves Star Wars: Battlefront.  I watch her run around, shooting Stormtroopers, hijacking AT-STs, throwing thermal detonators – and all the while she’s shouting at the screen.  She can play for hours.
“You wanna play with me?” she asks, holding up the controller.  I demur.
Because I find Star Wars: Battlefront stupidly boring.
Sure, I like shooting people in the face as much as anyone, but I personally need to know why I’m murdering twenty people.  And sure, there’s the overall mission of “Take over Hoth Base,” but a real story indicates knowing what’s at stake if I lose – what people will be hurt?  What does my character stand to lose if I fail?  What’s this battle mean for the Empire?
The answer is “nothing.”  If I lose, the screen will reset and I’ll play again, on the exact same screen, with the exact same layout.  It’s like some techno-Groundhog Day, where this battle eternally occurs and nothing ever changes as a result.
And for me, I look at the explosions and the deaths and the TIE fighters strafing from the sky and the orbital bombardments and it’s just background noise.  I don’t want to play unless I feel like I’m making some kind of difference – and this is like Mitchell and Webb’s The Football sketch, where the endless series of climaxes have no end game and no real point.
When Erin was out, I played Heavy Rain, the first of a new breed of narrative games.  And in the first fifteen minutes of Heavy Rain, I literally:
Woke up (and had to move the controller to get out of bed)

• Looked in my closet
• Shaved
• Took a shower
• Got dressed.

That was it.
And yet I found Heavy Rain infinitely more interesting than the explosions in Battlefront, because presumably whatever happened that this guy was abluting himself for mattered to him.  And sure enough, it was his son’s birthday, so when the next hour of the game consisted of doing his architecture plans and setting plates so he would have time to play with his son, I felt good about the time.
(And then I laughed, horribly, because his son died.  Because when there’s a heavy-handed scene at a CROWDED! MALL! when you buy your ten-year-old son a red balloon and he wanders into traffic and gets killed, it winds up being so over-the-top that it’s totally narm.  No spoilers, folks, that’s literally the prologue for a five-year-old game.)
But the point is, I spent an hour of my time prepping for a birthday party, and even though Heavy Rain’s controls are clunky and nonintuitive, I was way more interested than I was in shooting Stormtroopers.  Because for me, games are all about the story.  I’m playing Angry Birds not for the puzzle quotient so much as I am to defeat the pigs.  And the pigs can be shallowly depicted, but watching their stunned surprise before they poof away into clouds is enough for me to play for a while.
Games like Battlefront and Halo and all the other multiplayer games where you pile into an arena and kill and kill and kill and nothing will ever change as a result of it?
Can’t do it.
Sorry, kid.  I tried.  But do you wanna watch me shave this guy’s face?

Why I Love Steven Universe's Revelations

I was thinking about Steven Universe last night, and why it’s inspired such a passionate fandom.
I think part of the reason people connect to it is because Steven Universe’s narrative perfectly mirrors the experience of growing up.
One of the smartest Steven Universe episodes is Frybo, five episodes in: Steven, a small child, is being lectured by one of his parent-figures Pearl.  There’s a magical crystal loose in the house, and Pearl attempts to explain why the crystal is so dangerous to Steven, starting to discuss the war – but he gets distracted, his own inner thoughts out-narrating Pearl’s, and eventually he nods and agrees because he’s too embarrassed to admit he doesn’t understand.
Which is smart because it makes it clear that none of the Crystal Gems are hiding anything from Steven – well, no more than any responsible parent would keep away from a young kid, anyway.  They’re trying to explain to him what they think he needs to know.
It’s just that he’s too young to understand.
So Steven Universe is brilliant at putting you into the head of a young, cheerful boy who doesn’t quite Get It.  We, as adults, know there’s more to learn, but we’re constricted by what Steven’s curious about, which isn’t much.  And we’re also constricted by the way the Crystal Gems – his parents – are legitimately and responsibly trying to hide some of the more disturbing parts of their existences that he’s not ready for.
So when Steven grows, and starts to understand just how complex his family is, we grow with him.  We’re surprised when we discover that what we have taken as our mother-figures are, in fact, individual and flawed people, and sometimes the parents fight and it’s not at all funny, and they have past trauma they’ve never quite worked through but are doing their best to keep it together because they care so much for Steven and, in fact, for this world they’ve chosen to guard.
And I think the reason Steven Universe resonates is that it’s that rare children’s story where we come to revelations at about the same rate that Steven does.  In fact, I can’t recall a narrative – book, movie, or television – that unifies our understanding with the protagonist so beautifully.  (Harry Potter comes close at times, but when it comes to this aspect of expanding our, ahem, universe, Steven Universe smashes Harry.)
And we’re so eager for new episodes not because of the plot, per se – which is standard space opera translated into splashy Cartoon Network battles – but because for us, each episode is like growing up.  With each episode, we take one step into becoming a Steven Universe adult – one where we understand Garnet, Pearl, Greg, and Amethyst as we would understand another grown-up.
They’d all been simplified, once.  Now we understand them better.
As Steven grows, so do we, which is why I can’t wait.

Why I Love My Wife

Three weeks ago, I ate at a three-star Michelin restaurant and won the Hamilton lottery.  That was a day so good I woke up this morning and went, “Wow, that really happened.”
I did not drag my wife into that experience.
I’m still amazed that I did not drag my wife into that experience.
I am a man of bizarre passions, and I have long grown used to telling people “Hey, I want a beehive!” and having them go, “…what? Why?” I’ve dated a lot of women where I jollied them into liking what I did.
Which isn’t really me – it’s just what happens in relationships.  I know that feeling of sitting and listening to a Tori Amos album and thinking this is all right, but the second I stopped dating my ex-fiancee I never put on another Tori Amos album on again.
That relationship-dependent fandom hovers between coercion and true appreciation, but doesn’t deepen into love; you’ll go with this TV show or movie or music or hobby because your partner’s really into it, and it’s got enough stuff you enjoy that you’re willing to tag along, but the relationship-dependent fandom is a fire that needs constant stoking.
And I kept expecting that with Hamilton, my crazy obsession, my wife would just Tori Amos out the moment I was out of the room.
Except when Amal held a sing-along at ConFusion and I had to go do some Author Stuff, Gini stayed and sung the entire first act, leaving because the second act was “depressing.”  (It is.)
And she was more thrilled than I was when we won the lottery.
And she and I discussed Hamilton for hours on the way back in the car.
And the three-star Michelin restaurant, I’d feel bad about dropping a rent’s worth of cash on a single meal, except that when I tell stories about it she jumps in excitedly to tell about it.
What I love about my wife is that there’s not a lot of Tori Amosing in this relationship.  When my wife jumps on board a fandom with me, she’s every bit the squeeing goon that I am.  And we do have our separate ways – she doesn’t really get videogames, I don’t get gardening – but when we connect, her fandom is often fiercer than mine.
It’s silly, and sometimes inconvenient.  (Especially when I wind up dragging her into my love of a truly schlock show like Ink Masters, and then Gini doesn’t have the time to watch it with me.)
But what we got?  It’s real.  And that’s why the Hamilton and Eleven Madison Park was one of the best days: we were in it together.
I love that. And I love her.

On Westworld, Pornbots, And The Decline Of Porn-Centered Technology

Yesterday, I watched Westworld, which Gini proclaimed to be “The dumbest movie I’ve seen you watch.”
I’ll accept that. Westworld is a 1970s film that’s basically Michael Crichton’s precursor to Jurassic Park – we’ve finally invented robots so realistic that you can’t tell them apart from human beings, so there’s a gigantic amusement park where rich people go to live out their fantasies of killing and fucking people.  There’s Westworld, Medieval World, and Roman World –
And I know you won’t believe this, guys, but things go wrong with the robots and lots of tourists die when the killbots’ safety switches go awry.  (Or maybe you saw the parody in that Simpsons episode.)
What I love about Westworld, I think, is how much it jabs my worldbuilding mode.  This couldn’t possibly work, not if there were other humans attending.  Sure, the guns are heat-sensitive and won’t fire if they’re pointed at a human body – but what about ricochets or bullets punching through walls?  Shit, there’s a bar fight every day where the humans beat up robots, but what happens when a human takes a swing at the indistinguishable-from-other-robots accidentally breaks another human’s nose?  You couldn’t possibly maintain a flawless illusion and keep people safe.
Furthermore, the robots – the most valuable thing in the entire park – are actually being shot and stabbed and wrecked every day.  The movie shows the absurdly large staff of repairmen who are fixing degrading robots because people are firing actual goddamned bullets into these things. And I don’t know about you, but a business model based on “We shoot up delicate machinery every day” is gonna be more expensive than an amusement park.
No.  What that would be used for is military training.
Anyone who follows the military knows that their primary goal is to get soldiers used to the chaos of combat.  There’s a lot of debate as to the specifics, but somewhere between 30 and 70% of people will not shoot a person without extensive training to get rid of the reluctance to kill.  Even if they’re in mortal danger.
Plus, there’s a lot of shock in combat.  Watching your friends die is something that’s hard to train for.  Seeing actual explosions that might kill you is hard to train for.  There’s a military camp devoted to simulating urban combat right now, and they have an Iraqi marketplace that has real fake grenade launchers that burst in your vicinity and have fake guts laced with a fake smell of lacerated bowels that pop out when people get shot.
Strategic Operations would be all over robots you couldn’t distinguish from humans.  And it’d cost millions to get each of ’em working, but the military has lots of cash.
There’d be no Westworld.  There’d be a combat zone that gets out of hand.
I ventured this on Twitter the other day, and people said, “Naw, man!  You know porn would be the first uses of these robots!”  And unfortunately, you guys are behind the times.
Porn’s now the trailing edge of tech.
Time was that porn was the first use of every new technology – hey, VHS, DVDs, streaming video, all porn!  But there’s been a lot of factors that have condemned porn to the shadows, not least of which is that credit card companies and PayPal have all decided to choke porn off at the source.
Wanna get paid?  PayPal will freeze your account if they discover you’re using porn, and you’ll never get the funds.  Most credit card processors won’t work with you.  FetLife – the largest kinky social network – actually had to turn off its “paid account” function for several months because they couldn’t source a way for people to pay them aside from sending checks in the mail.
If you’re trying to make cash in porn, you’re starting out behind the 8-ball because America loves porn but hates to be seen watching porn.
And that’s a problem when so much of the leading edge of tech is scale – specifically Big Data and combining billions of bits of feedback to provide targeted results.  Netflix’s and Google’s power isn’t in the idea, it’s in how much power they apply to the idea.  There were streaming movies and search engines before, but what made Netflix and Google necessary was in throwing hundreds of combined servers into analyzing data and providing feedback that gives you precisely what you want when you want it.  Google’s useful because it combines hundreds of factors when you type in “thai seafood” to look through your history and your location and what millions of other people finally clicked on when they looked up those two words to provide you with the best thai seafood restaurant within 20 miles of you.
If you’re a porn site, there’s no way you could afford that.  You’d get shut down before you could spin up all those servers.  There are a handful of sites that are attempting to be next-gen (Videobox, anybody?), but even their next-gen attempt at porn feels a lot like Netflix from three years ago.
(And that’s assuming that people would pay, when thieving alternatives like PornHub are available.)
Furthermore, the new technologies are much more sandboxed than they used to be.  Hey, wouldn’t you think the iPhone would be perfect for new porn technologies?  Well, it would be, but Apple won’t approve your app, so fuck off.  Wouldn’t Google Glass or the Oculus Rift be perfect for titillating three-D porn?  Yeah, but they’re not going to approve your app, either.
Most of the new technologies in place have locked out porn specifically because they know it’ll get their funding cut and/or won’t be family-friendly, and so the porn advance has pretty much stopped.  Oh, there’s people out there hacking their vibrators the best they can, but the concept of the porn industry driving technology has run out of gas.
So I hate to tell you: if and when the indistinguishable-from-human-robots come along, they’re going to be spurting blood, not semen.
Don’t like that?  Go yell at PayPal.