A Mild Scam

The other day, I got an offer from [COMPANY REDACTED] in an email entitled “[REDACTED] Sponsoring,” where they said they were fans of my blog and offered to give me a $50 Amazon gift certificate if only I mentioned their company here, on my blog.
It was a friendly-sounding email, and continued to sound friendly right up until I discovered three of my friends also got this same email.  (Except they got offered a $25 gift certificate.  I guess it’s done by Google Page Rank, or summat.)  So I was tilting towards saying “Thanks but no thanks” before, and now definitely am off.
So.  If you got that email?  They’re casting it wide in order to get the word out on their software.  Don’t feel flattered, and I’d wonder if the gift certificate would arrive, myself.
(Though I feel bad!  The guy said he wanted to have coffee with me!  And everything!)

You Make The Blog

I have many pressing issues of the day, including:

• Why the traditional libertarian alternative of “Just shop someplace else!” fails when businesses start to discriminate;
• Religious expression and feminism, based on a particularly irritating essay posted the other day;
• The potential origins of an artificial “I feel”.
• The limits of sexual consent.

But I have to get to work on a big refactor for my day job today, so hey.  Vote which one you’d like to see on Monday, and I’ll make it happen.  Or suggest another topic, and maybe I’ll write about that!
So tired.
 

Seriously. Fuck Those Guys. (The Big Brain Theory)

So I’ve been watching Discovery’s The Big Brain Theory for a while, on a tentative basis.  It’s a show I should like, with a Mythbusters-like premise: a bunch of smart guys get together to solve engineering challenges.  And it should be fun, except the people who make it have clearly never watched reality shows.
Which is to say that there’s some really poor choices that go into the structure of the show.  For example, when someone is voted off the show at the end, they stay on the team, which makes a modicum of sense; you want guys working on big challenges that require massive infrastructure, and if the nerds left then the finals would be two dudes working on erector sets.  So they keep them about.
But they don’t have them wear different clothes, so you can’t tell who’s been kicked off and who’s not.  They’re just eight interchangeable nerds in nerd T-shirts.  And the mechanism via which they’re incentivized to stay on the show, the chance to get voted back in, is completely incoherent. Nobody’s sure how they retain their old standing. So there’s no sense of forward motion, no sense of anything at stake.   If you lose?  Well, you’re still there.  (Not that there’s any tension in losing; Kal Penn shrugs and says, “Okay, well, it’s not you.”)
The bigger problem is, however, the idiot judges.
See, at the beginning of each show, the contestants are presented with the challenge (stop an incoming foam missile, prevent this box from exploding), and they have an hour to sketch out their designs to solve the problem.  At which point the judges decide which designs are worthwhile, choosing the two team captains.
But the judges are never held accountable for their poor decisions, and inevitably prioritize “flashy” over “workable,” meaning that both teams failed the first three challenges.  And the show might have been interesting if the judges had sat down and said, “So what are we doing wrong in choosing people?” and treated the show itself as a scientific theory to be  refined, as in, “Clearly we’re not picking the right designs, so how can we improve our decision-making process?”
And then there was Dan.
The nerds were, typically, competitive and asocial, but Dan was the worst.  He was a flat-out bully, yelling at people in attempts to intimidate them, throwing things, shrieking at the top of his lungs and then storming out in a paroxysm of fury.   He verbally threatened people with veiled threats of physical violence, throwing hammers to prove that he was better at welding.  One of the women in the group was so threatened by his antics that she literally could not remain in the same room with him.
And when it came time to choose who got to go back on the team, was there a contest?  No.  Was there a challenge of wits?  No.  The judges merely picked one person out of the elimination lineup, because they thought he had potential.
And they picked Dan.
Oh, sure, he had temper problems, they said.  But his engineering designs –
– and I turned it off.
Fuck those guys.  Fuck their show.  When they do this on television, to a show with millions of people, what you’re telling folks is that it’s perfectly okay to be an abusive asshole, as long as you’re really good at what you do.  (A talent that wasn’t necessarily shown on the show, but whatever.)  And it’s telling people that yes, if you’re smart, you too can be a bully!  It’s okay!  We want to reward this behavior!  He’s good television!
I can’t stop them from choosing whatever damn fool person they choose to pick.  But I can stop their show, cancel my DVR subscription, and tell everyone that this show is a steaming pile of shit that should be ashamed of itself.  If you were watching, I heartily encourage you to stop.  And if you weren’t watching… well, it looks like you made the right choice.

How The Story Is Told: Hell's Kitchen Vs. Master Chef

Non-writers think the idea is the unit of writing – as in, “Hey, I got this great idea, I’ll sell it to you, and you make a million bucks!”
Problem is, the idea is actually one of the least important bits of writing.  I mean, yes, you need an idea to start a story, but an idea is like selling someone an acorn for a hundred bucks, because hey, man, this could be some serious lumber.
No.  Stories are all about the execution – the characters who exist in that idea, the emotional journey they take, the reader’s investment in the story.  Without that, the idea pretty much counts for nil – and the shows that brought it home to me last night were Hell’s Kitchen and Master Chef.
Both of them are reality cooking shows, hosted by the same guy.  The structure is basically the same – throw sixteen cooks into a pressure cooker, have them do small-scale challenges (each cooks a dish with a certain number of ingredients), and large-scale (they split into teams to cook for huge numbers of people).  Every week, one of the less-talented chefs is tossed off the line, leading to the One True Chef.
That’s the idea.
Now, the execution is in how the shows present the chefs.  Because I find Hell’s Kitchen exhausting and sad, vastly preferring Master Chef – as Gini accurately observed, “I never want to cook anything after watching Hell’s Kitchen, but Master Chef makes me want to get out there and create.”  And that’s because the challenges are presented entirely differently.
In Master Chef, when a chef beats a particularly difficult challenge, there’s a loving circle of the camera on the food that they worked so hard to create.  There’s swelling, triumphant music.  There are long shots of the flushed victor’s face, of the other teammates clapping for him (perhaps with a brief, ominous cut to The One Jerk conspicuously not clapping), and an acknowledgement that this chef has, at least in this moment, faced the abyss and pulled through.
In Hell’s Kitchen, you have the exact same moment – at least as far as the chef is concerned – but we cut away to the other teammates, each bitching about how they could have done better or how the chef got lucky. The food is barely shown. The emphasis is all on the competition, personalities, the toll this high-pressure situation takes on its teammates.  There’s a reason Hell’s Kitchen spends so much time in the after rooms, showing the competitors bitching and romancing and cutting each other down, whereas the Master Chef contestants might as well be sealed in vaccuform until they’re trotted out to perform.
And it’s not like some members of Master Chef don’t hate each other.  Clearly, if you watch last night’s episode, Krissi and Jordan are perfectly willing to insult their fellow teammates.  They could get that footage.  Likewise, there’d be nothing stopping Hell’s Kitchen from presenting the food as if it was the singular accomplishment of a chef and displaying their well-earned pride.  But one reality show is structured to show the challenges in a much more sympathetic light, and the other showcases the challenges as personal insults to the other team members.
Now, some would argue that this is only natural: after all, Master Chef is the “amateur” show, and Hell’s Kitchen is the “professional” show.  But no.  It’d be just as easy to argue that the professional chefs would be kind and courteous to each other, having competed with other chefs all their lives, and the amateurs would be flailing and unstructured.  The truth is, one show chose to make the chefs sympathetic in order to differentiate itself, and that’s the only reason.
The fact is, I suspect both shows are very similar underneath the hood.  You’re placing people in a weeks-long competition that stretches them to their limits, forcing them to live together, separated from their families, knowing their whole future is (ostensibly) on the line.  There will be good moments of surprising friendships, and bad moments of egotistical self-destruction. All of those scenes are on the plate, like ingredients, like idea, a messy gathering of disparate concepts waiting to be pulled up and edited into a Story.
One’s a nice, heartwarming story.  The other’s a cold, mean story of chefs yelling at each other.  They’re both the same thing, at their heart; FOX just had to put a lot of work into them to turn them into a hit TV show.

Are You Being Censored, Or Are You Just Being Unpopular?

There’s a behavior I call “dick-tionarying” someone, which generally involves hauling out the Merriam-Webster’s and saying, “Well, actually….” to tell someone why they’re wrong.
One of the most frequent dick-tionarying topics?  Censorship.  Because someone says some unpopular thing and enough people cry for their head, and the next thing you know they’ve lost their job.  And they say, “Well, that’s censorship!” and the dictionary gets unfolded and people say, “Actually, it’s only censorship if the government’s involved.  That’s just the free market.”
But the difference?  Pretty fuckin’ slim from the point of the person who just lost their job.  If you were a gay person in the 1950s, good luck getting your views published in the New York Times, and forget getting them on CBS.  If you were a vocal advocate of interracial marriage in the 1970s, well, you probably weren’t going to make it as a newscaster.  There’s no official term yet for “Being unable to get your opinion heard in the widest arenas because nobody wants to hear them,” but I’m pretty sure that a lot of my transgendered friends feel the lack of a voice.
The fact that there’s no law making this happen, just a bunch of people voting with their dollars, doesn’t make it less painful to the people affected.  I mean, Cheerios just got a lot of negative pushback from their commercial showing a mixed-race couple.  If enough people protest, Cheerios will not feature mixed-race couples in future advertisements, nor will other advertisers be likely to do so.  And there will be a lack of interracial families on television, giving the impression people who watch a lot of television as though interracial couples are rare and freaky things, and making it harder for those people to feel included in mainstream America.
But that’s not censorship.  That’s just people making their preferences heard.  And if enough of the Cheerios crowd want to see no interracial couples fouling their airwaves because it makes them unhappy, then those couples will be deleted.  An opinion will be messily removed, and the talk will proceed without them.
As someone who wants talks to have all sorts of inputs, those absences concern me.
Thing is, it works both ways.  There’s no censorship at play if Resnick and Malzberg lose their column in the SFWA Bulletin over their stream of offensive comments towards women and liberals.  That’s just straight-up market pressure from people voting with their dollars… and if you’re a conservative who agrees with the boys, well, maybe it’s not censorship, but you just got told to shut the fuck up, same as all the other liberal examples.  You annoyed the crowd, and you got booted.
Is that good or bad?  My take is that it doesn’t matter.  It’s merely a fact of life: piss off enough people and they will no longer want to hear you.  That’s a terror that people don’t like thinking about – that the world is basically a big game of Survivor, and you can get voted off the island, often by people you violently disagree with – but the blade that cuts your crazy liberal ideas out of the nightly news is the same blade that’s probably moving to cut Resnick and Malzberg down now.
So be aware of the blade.
When you speak in public, especially as a professional writer, it is your job to be aware of who you are offending.  Maybe you’ll choose specifically to offend people, as a way of speaking truth to power – with the very real risk of never being heard from again.  And if you choose to thoughtfully break those ties, I salute you no matter what side you’re on, as you’ve just made a statement of conscience at cost.  I may disagree violently with you, but you just put your voice on the line to say what you thought was true.
But what Resnick and Malzberg did, I feel, was to offend without thinking.  This column was their space, a place to pat each other on the back – note the way they recommended each other’s books as great books in a prior column – and make dinosaur in-jokes at everyone’s expense, all at eight cents a word.  They weren’t thinking about anyone else’s opinions because hey, we’re Resnick and Malzberg, we’ve been saying crazy stuff for years, who could possibly be offended by us stirring the pot?
One senses a thorough befuddlement in their writings, as though “How could this have happened?”  And that’s the stupid end of not-quite-censorship.  You should know what your audience consists of… and if you’re going to insult large portions of them, you should at least do so with a concise, compact argument and not a lot of Statler-and-Waldorf blathering.  Because in a sense, it’s more offensive to be insulted by people who barely seem to understand that you exist.
You’re always going to run into that potential of the crowd rising up whenever you speak offense.  So make sure you don’t insult people for stupid reasons.  Do it thoughtfully, purposefully, concisely, masterfully, logically, unassailably. Do it to make change.  Do it to change minds.
Because your public opinion is always, always, at the mercy of other people’s good will.  It’s a currency.  Spend it wisely.