You Don't Know Me, And That's Okay

“Wanna pick me up at my house?” I ask my first-time date, who I met on The Internets.
“Can we meet at a restaurant instead?” she types back.  “I don’t know you.”
Thing is, I know that no assault is likely to happen at my house.  Even were I the kind of guy who was likely to sexually assault a random stranger on the first date, which I am distinctly not, I am polyamorous – and my wife lives with me.  She will most likely be in the living room, working when you arrive.  She is strong on consent, and would be severely – nay, violently – Not Okay if anything happened here.
Plus, my daughter’s currently living with us while she hunts for a new job, which means that any sort of sexy fun-times at La Casa McJuddMetz are Distinctly Out right now.  (She’s old enough where she has been dating on her own for years – but she’s been courteous not to bring her dates back to go face-suckin’ in her room while Gini and I sit awkwardly on the living room couch, and I feel I should equitably return that favor.)
So there are no dangers in picking me up at my house.  None.  Zero.  Worst that’ll happen is that Shasta will bark at you.  (Okay, that’s a guarantee.  Our dog is a frickin’ barkstorm.)
But.
You don’t know that.
So that’s totally cool that you’re wary of me until you know me better.
That’s not a personal insult; how could it be?  You don’t fucking know me.  And while yeah, #notallmen are rapists and abusers, #notalleBaysellers rip me off.  But I’ve been burned enough times to check the user’s feedback rating before committing my money to that auction.  You’re committing your bodily safety to showing up alone at my house.  And given that there’s no particular feedback on me for you to scour, it’s your right to be a little cautious until you’re convinced that I am what my OKCupid profile says I am.
And what the fuck does that say about me if I get pissy when you don’t want to walk alone into a stranger’s house?  Yes, La Casa McJuddMetz is a nice comfortable suburban 1400 square-foot place – but for all you know it’s the brick-pit from Silence of the Lambs.
If I get mad, what that says about me is that I have so little fucking empathy for anyone else’s situation that you should not fucking date me under any circumstances.  Because if I can’t understand how dangerous this might be for you, getting bent out of joint because hey, I’m better than that, then I’m gonna be crappy about a hundred other things that any boyfriend should just parse immediately.
(That’s also being kind.  I could be the kind of manipulative sociopath who’s trying to lure you to his house with guilt and social pressure.  Guess what?  You don’t know that’s true, either.)
Look, if you date me for six months and still don’t trust me, we have an issue.  But we’ve never met face-to-face.  You have only seen my words, and some pictures I assure you are me.  And many of the women I’ve dated have come over to my house on the first date, because they made some judgment call that I was trustworthy – but some haven’t.
Good for them.
Good that they protected their safety in the way that they saw fit.
(Inspired by this knocks-it-out-of-the-park Robot Hugs cartoon.)

Dragon Age Inquisition Review: Mountain In Your Face

One of my less-defensible pleasures is a show called Dude, You’re Screwed, a show so insignificant it doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry.  But the pitch is this: a group of hardcore survivalists drop each other in various hostile environments – deserts, ice fields, mountains – with no survival tools.  They have 100 hours to survive, and find other people.
The trick is, the hardcore survivalists know how other hardcore survivalists think, and they’re out to screw their friends.  So they pick the trickiest locations.
The classic screw is this: “I dropped him off high on a mountain so he can see the river.  Most experienced survivalists will head towards the water, knowing rivers lead to civilization.  Except this river goes thirty miles in the wrong direction!  Then it drops into an underground cave at the base of an impassable mountain!  He’ll waste days!”
This is what it’s like playing Dragon Age Inquisition.
Many people have noted that Dragon Age has stolen some techniques from Skyrim.  Unfortunately, they’ve stolen Skyrim’s utterly-useless map system, which consists of a constant stream of “Great, the quest target point is over here, and… oh, wait, no.  There’s a chasm blocking the way.  So how do you get there from here?  I guess I’ll have to wander around in random directions until I find the pass that leads there.”
All the mini-map gives us is a blinking dot and a compass point.  Which would be useful if “Traveling in a straight line” was a viable strategy at any point.  But it isn’t.  They’ve gone very far out of their way to make it an unviable strategy.  The map folds in and over on itself, creating eddies and alcoves.
I understand why they do that: they only have so much space they can pack into a given rectangle.  They want to make it rewarding for people who explore.  And I support that!
But can you give us poor lost bastards, who don’t enjoy exploring, some tools to find the next fucking quest point?
I’ve played Dragon Age for about 50 hours at this point, and I would say roughly 5 of those hours have consisted of “Fuck, I know the wolf camp is around here somewhere, but… oh, god, another mountain in the way.  Let’s backtrack and try again.”  Which means for me, roughly 10% of my time spent on this game has been tedium verging on frustration.  It’s like the fucking designers don’t want me to find all the cool things I’m supposed to do, and instead desire me to go on combat-free, quest-free journeys through the same goddamned valleys I’ve cleared out before.
Now, I’m a special case, as I have no head for directions.  I have lived in the same house for fifteen years, and I literally cannot tell you the names of our cross-streets.  I get lost going everywhere.  So the game is particularly punishing for me, because I’m not going to pick up on their visual cues.
But I’ve talked with others, and they too would like to spend less time fighting mountains and more time fighting monsters.
The reason we want to spend less time wandering is because it kills the story.  All your quests are variations on “Go here and kill a monster / get a foozle / kill a monster and get its foozle.”  The only thing that stops this from being repetitive is the tale behind it!  It’s not a foozle – there’s a grieving widower who wants to leave flowers on his wife’s grave!  And Bioware, you’re great at constructing moving mini-stories that capture my attention.
But those stories evaporate after twenty minutes of wandering around, yelling, “Goddammit, I have to get to the yellow dot, how the fuck do I get to the yellow dot?”  The widower gets forgotten.  The reasons I’m supposed to do this get forgotten.
You have reduced all this emotional impact to a yellow dot and pressing X when I get to the dot, and that does your narrative a disservice.
Look, there has to be a balance.  It wouldn’t be that hard to have an option that puts more details into the mini-map, so we can see that this straight-line travel actually needs to veer west.  Hell, make it a character option that I have to pay XP for!  You already do that with an Inquisition Perk that reveals more locations on the map.  I would give up so much fighting power to have a glowing yellow arrow that points me towards the major battles.  (And hell, I’d even understand if you said you could provide no arrows to optional gotta-catch-’em-all quests like the shards and the Red Lyrium.)
As it is, what I hope I’ll remember about Dragon Age is the sweeping storyline you’ve constructed.  What I fear I’ll remember is wandering around another fucking hillock in the Hinterlands, having long forgotten what I was supposed to do at the glowing dot, endlessly backtracking because it’s here somewhere, I just don’t know how to find it.
Help me find your cool shit.  I don’t think that’s too much to ask.

On Eternal Vigilance

Long-time commenter Bunny42 had this to say:

It feels like a crappy way to live, to anticipate negativity everywhere. That seems to encourage a victim mentality. I’ve always believed there’s a kind of aura around people who live in fear, and baddies can home in on that state of mind. A strong, confident woman is much less likely to be accosted than a retiring little mousy woman.

To which I replied:

Seems like a crappy way not to live.
I have many good friends. The reason I have many good friends is that I constantly have a filter up of, “Are these people taking advantage of me? Are they involving me in unwise decisions? Are they hurting people unnecessarily?”
You’re all like, “But you must be a mousy woman!” No. I’m actually the strong, confident person who’s much less likely to be accosted by drama-freaks – and I am that way because I continually check. I’d be mousy if I did as you suggested and didn’t actually interrogate reality on a regular basis, and then got abused at what seemed like random intervals because I didn’t bother to look. I’d feel uncertain because life would feel out of control, thinking why are some of my friends so crazy? and feeling like drama was like thunder, just appearing sporadically with no warning at all. I’d be afraid, because bad shit would happen and I’d have no incoming radar at all to see it coming.
I don’t live in fear. I live in honesty. And yes, I’m watchful, but I think it’s the sheerest foolhardiness to abandon safety just so you can relax.
There is a distinct difference.

I am constantly on-guard for some things.  But that doesn’t make me a negative person, because one can be on-guard for relevant questions such as, say, “Am I about to be fired from work?” without letting that become a fearful future.  I can acknowledge that yeah, being fired is a possibility, and as such keep checking in with my bosses to make sure I’m doing my job to their liking.
That’s not living in fear of an uncertain future: that’s gathering feedback, and reacting appropriately.  Because there have been a couple of times I’ve displeased by bosses mightily by not doing the work they expected of me.  Staying aware let me get back in the groove.
I think that one of the keys to good relationships is to always keep in mind that your friends can fuck you over, whether they mean to or not, and patrolling that boundary to ensure that things don’t get out of hand.  That’s not a negative thing.  I don’t expect them to do it, because they’re my friends.  But if something makes me go “Hrm,” then I follow up on that.
It doesn’t make me continually afraid.  It makes me one of those confident people.  I’m confident if something starts to slide south, I’m ready for it.  Which makes me enjoy the good times – which are the bulk of my time with my friends – all the more.

"So Why Didn't You Do Anything?"

The other day, I wrote about an incident with my goddaughter, wherein we were at a restaurant when a strange dude asked “Aren’t you the cutest girl?”, patted her belly, and moved on.  And a fair number of people asked:
“Why didn’t you yell at the dude for touching the kid?”
Good question.
The strict answer is, “I totally should have” – and before anyone attempts to frame this essay otherwise, let me be crystal clear: going, “Hey, dude, don’t touch her without asking first!” would have been the right thing to do.  It’s a failure on my part that I didn’t.  I screwed up by not setting a good example of how to police appropriate boundaries.
Yet the question I’m going to field here is, “Why did I screw up?”  And the answer is simple:
Because I was shocked, and the incident was quick.
Had I been braced for incoming belly-patters, I would have absolutely done the right thing here.  But like a lot of incidents of harassment, this arrived when I was waiting in line to get breakfast, prepping for a nice day with a kid I loved, having a nice conversation.  If you’d asked me, “So is a random person going to invade your private space?” I probably would have been so surprised by the question that I would have asked you to repeat yourself.
So when this happened, I acted suboptimally.  By the time my brain had processed Wait a minute, this is pretty crazy, this shouldn’t be happening, dude was already out the door.
And so it was that I fucked up.
Problem is, “Fucking up when presented with surprising new situations” is actually a chronic human behavior.  It’s why purse snatchers are so effective – by the time someone registers Wait, did somebody just yank my purse off my shoulder?, the snatcher is long gone.  It’s why you don’t have a good retort when a stranger says something nasty to you in public.  It’s why, despite machismo gun-owners telling everyone how they’d drop a gunman if they saw one, in fact most people (gun-owners included) don’t react heroically to a public shooting; they’re still shocked by all of this new and horrifying input.
We’re all awesome quarterbacks come Monday morning.  But when you experience something weird for the first time, your brain is often locked up trying to figure out what’s happening – and by the time the brain gets around to determining how you should react, the moment has passed.
Now, there are people who are really good at handling purse snatchers, and really excellent at snarking back to mean strangers.  Sadly, most of them are good at it because of  experience.  They’re not gifted with natural instincts; they have, instead, been abused enough times that a) this is not new to them, and b) they have developed coping mechanisms.  This is why we train soldiers – you can get a guy to be a very good shot at a gun range, but that’s very different from maintaining accuracy when the target is shooting back.  We put people through combat training because we need them to have that adrenaline rush not be a surprise.
And again, I’ll repeat: I should have called the dude out.  I had good excuses, but my goal in life is not to provide good excuses – it’s to emulate the kind of change I wanna see in the world.  In that, I failed.
Yet there are people – mostly women – who would have called this dude out instantly.  This is likely because they have lots of experience in handling creeper dudes, and are continually braced for moments like this, never relaxing no matter how joyous the day.  In other words, they’ve developed a healthy defense mechanism because they’re continually being assaulted.  Which is, you know, not awesome.
The danger is wandering into the trap of “should have done.”
In a lot of cases, “Should have done” provides a healthy way of modelling future behavior.  People saying, “You should have called the dude out!” helps me to create a mental model for the next time this happens, so if I encounter Creeper 2: Electric Boogaloo, I’ll have societal expectations backing me to go “Yeah, this what you should do in response to an abnormal situation, get ready to mix it up.”  Which means that next time, I’ll (hopefully) be prepared with a more helpful reaction.
Yet the danger is in conflating a substandard response with substandard intent.
I’m hip-deep in science-fiction conventions, where harassment charges are sadly routine.  And one of the most common reactions when someone says “This person harassed me at a party” is “Well, they didn’t say anything at the time – so they weren’t really offended!  They’re just making a fuss in retrospect!”
The problem is that when you are presented with a shocking situation, you often don’t do what you “should”.  You react in weird ways – and the more shocking the situation, the more time it may take you to figure out emotionally how to process this.
(This is why I tell people “There’s no right way to grieve for a death” – you’ve just run into a situation that few people encounter often enough to get used to, and you may react in super-odd ways.  All those people telling you how you should be sad is not helpful when you’re numb, or angry, or needing to get out and party.)
If someone ruins a party for you with some unexpected sexual pressure that comes out of nowhere, you might deal with that in ways that you’re unhappy with in retrospect – ways that seem bizarre to others, who “know” how they’d react if they were in that situation.
Except they don’t know how they’d react.  They know how they think they’d react when presented with a situation they read about in an essay, but that’s often very different from how they do react if and when it happens.  How they’d react when presented with Surprise Harassment is often very different from how they’d react if they had time to contemplate it in advance.  (Which is why harassers often use a lot of pressure to get what they want – they know that sometimes, the Surprise Harassment response that springs from politeness and not wanting to offend is much more positive than the studied negative reaction they’d get later.)
Now, in my case, I’ll state for the third time that there was a clear best-case scenario here, and I failed to achieve it.  I don’t excuse that failure.  Best I can do is take that lesson and be braced for future impact.  That’s the way I process failure, and I don’t claim that’s the best way for everyone, just me.
But all too often I see people conflating reaction with intent: “Well, they didn’t reject it violently at the time, so they clearly were okay with X happening!”  And no.  My point here is that people often react weirdly to weird situations.  How they react in that moment doesn’t necessarily reflect who they are or what they really believe, but rather reflects a brain that’s rapidly trying to piece together a big batch of WTF.
And by the time they are really good at handling the exceptional cases, they often forget that they live in a world that’s different from what other people experience.  I’m lucky enough not to live in a world where people routinely invade the personal space of people I love.  Others don’t get that.  That’s a thing we call “privilege.”
One downside of privilege is being potentially blind to the hazards that others routinely encounter.  Another is that we’re shocked when we step outside the bubble.
I stepped outside.  I got surprised.  And I’m not overly shamed by my reaction, because I wasn’t prepped for it – to be shamed by that is to agree that I did something shameful, when in reality it’s belly-rubbin’ dude who did the shameful thing.  I feel pretty thoroughly that the shame falls upon the shoulders of the jerks.
But the responsibility for fixing it?  That’s something I feel personally.  I can recognize I did something suboptimal that allowed that shameful behavior to continue, and vow to try to do better next time.  I don’t blame myself – but I do recognize an opportunity to model better behavior in the future, so that shameful jerks like that don’t walk away from other stunned people, thinking what they did was fine.
That’s not necessarily what everyone wants to do.  Nor would I expect it of them.
But I expect it of me.

In Which Chris Rock Nails It

Chris Rock is one of the more incisive people in America when it comes to nudging out the truth.  And his interview in Vulture Magazine is solid gold from start to finish, making several cogent observations about American culture and Obama’s success and the nature of comedy.
But he fucking slam-dunks it with this thought:

Here’s the thing. When we talk about race relations in America or racial progress, it’s all nonsense. There are no race relations. White people were crazy. Now they’re not as crazy. To say that black people have made progress would be to say they deserve what happened to them before.
…So, to say Obama is progress is saying that he’s the first black person that is qualified to be president. That’s not black progress. That’s white progress. There’s been black people qualified to be president for hundreds of years. If you saw Tina Turner and Ike having a lovely breakfast over there, would you say their relationship’s improved? Some people would. But a smart person would go, “Oh, he stopped punching her in the face.” It’s not up to her. Ike and Tina Turner’s relationship has nothing to do with Tina Turner. Nothing. It just doesn’t. The question is, you know, my kids are smart, educated, beautiful, polite children. There have been smart, educated, beautiful, polite black children for hundreds of years. The advantage that my children have is that my children are encountering the nicest white people that America has ever produced. Let’s hope America keeps producing nicer white people.

Aaaaaaand nailed it.
In case you’re a right-winger foaming at the mouth now, Mr. Rock also goes on to make some observations about college campuses that I think you’d agree with.  But whatever.  Read the interview.  It’s awesome.