Here You Go / Way Too Fast / Don't Slow Down / You're Gonna Crash

Heya, folks –
I have a lot to say (and do!), but right now I’m suffering from a sort of chronic exhaustion.  Well, that’s not correct – I can still do things – but it emerges as a titanic swell of “Don’t wanna,” followed by slacking.  I still have to finish off the Clarion Blog-A-Thon, and write a couple of entries I’ve been meaning to get around to on my uncle’s car key and followups to earlier posts on Tosh.0, but I look at the screen and all I want to do is play Duels of the Planeswalkers on my iPad.
So I’ll be back, but right now I’m kind of reclusive, like Howard Hughes.  But uglier.  And poorer.  And in a better bathrobe.  And with fewer jars of urine stored about the house.
In the meantime, I’ll leave this entry free to one of those happy memes that used to permeate LiveJournal, but looser.  Is there anything you’ve wanted to say to me?  Anything you wanted to ask?  You know, just because I don’t feel like writing doesn’t mean like I don’t feel like interacting, so hey, you wanna drop me a line, go ahead.  I’m open to exchanges of whatevs.
Slacker Ferrett rules the day.

Will Twilight Out-Endure Harry Potter?

“Publishers can find books that are popular and resonate with a shit-ton of people, like Twilight, but do I think Twilight’s going to pass the generation test? Probably not.” – Spookykat

In the category of “things I don’t like to think too hard about,” I’m going to disagree with Spooky and say that I think Twilight will be more popular than Harry Potter… at least for the next couple of waves of kids.
Now, let me hedge by saying that it’s damn hard to predict which books/songs/movies will become immortal and which will fade away.  If you had asked me twenty years back to name the one contemporary song that every college student would be able to sing word-for-word two decades after it had been released, I would never in a million years have named “Baby Got Back.”  Yet there it is, popular as hell.  So what do I know?  Still, it’s fun to speculate.
And on the “Harry vs.  Twilight” front, I will go on record as saying Harry Potter is a far superior series of books.  It’s a complex kids’ tale about morality, and the need to do the right thing, and loyalty.  There are gray bits and good plotting and excellent characterization and real human heroism.
Twilight’s rooted straight to the groin.
For all of the discussions about women not having the same sexual urges as men, I think when you put “nobility” up against “your one and only true boyfriend who will love you forever,” that sexual urge is going to clobber Harry.
As I’ve said before, Twilight has a lot of flaws, but the one thing it gets perfectly, 100%, spot-on correct is that elated feeling of “We’re in love and it’s perfect and it’s going to be forever.”  And that’s the kind of thing that gets a lot of traction among young girls, in the same way they fall in love with Justin Bieber and go nuts because this is their way of figuring out what it’s like to be dating someone – a thing they endure a crush-ton of pressure over, since it’s hard-wired into almost every narrative that they will have to fall in love, and if so then what’s it going to be like?  And any book that tells them, “You can find an immortal vampire who’s been around for a hundred years and has never ever liked a girl before, yet when he sees you he’ll fall so madly in love with you that he’ll abandon everything he’s ever known to be your eternal protector and the most loyal boy ever and a great kisser, too,” then we’re dealing with fantasies that spike straight through the center of sexuality.
That shit gets handed around.  I’d bet dimes to dollars that for future generations, Harry Potter will be given to them by their parents.  Twilight will be handed to them by their girlfriends.  And which do you think they’re more likely to read? Especially now that there’s the even crazier 50 Shades of Gray to graduate to, which everyone knows is Twilight fanfiction plus?
I mean, it’s not like any teacher ever sat down with their thirteen-year-old student and said, “Here, read Flowers in this Attic.”  But man, somehow every teenaged girl I knew growing up had gotten their hands on that sucker.  Because it was hot and sexy and yet somehow safe – not like the writings of the Marquis de Sade or Lolita, which had weird overtones they found repellent.
(And don’t ask me what the dividing line is between Flowers, which sounds horrendous from the plot synopses, and De Sade – if I knew, I’d be writing bestsellers.  I just know from talking to women who read those books that one made them squirm in pleasant ways and the other didn’t.)
The good news is, I don’t think this will endure forever.  Like teen pop stars, the “sexy teenaged book” will eventually be replaced.  Like all teenagers, teenaged girls have little sense of loyalty and desire something unique to their own generation.  Eventually, another big sexy book will crop up, and they will see that as their generational anthem even as they’ll never really claim it as such, and then we’ll see how Harry Potter fares to eternity.
As for Twilight, I’m reasonably sure it’ll have a higher arc initially, and then plunge into an interesting footnote for the 2000s.   On the scrap heap of history.  So it goes.

The Legacy Of Harry Potter

I don’t know if the Harry Potter series will become a beloved classic, like Narnia and Little House and Oz.  I think there’s a chance they might dry up and disappear.
Not right away, of course; Harry Potter was so absolutely huge that whole generations of kids who grew up on Harry’s brave adventures are planning on reading it to their kids.  So the next generation is going to get a earful of Harry, whether they really want to or not.
But will that Harry Potter dosage be satisfying?  Because when I think about Harry Potter, I think about my daughter Amy.
Amy was eight when we started reading her Harry Potter, and back then there were only two of them.  She read the first one and absolutely adored it, and thought the second one was too scary but she kind-of liked it because, well, she liked the first one and when you’re a kid and decide you love something, you kind of cling to it.  So even though she sort of had to race past certain sections of the second book, she still listened to it on CD about a bazillion times.  (And why not? Jim Dale’s voice was awesome.)
And every couple of years, a new book came out!  And she found Azkaban to be really terribly scary, and it was, but by then Amy was a little older and used to frights.  And the death at the end of Goblet of Fire – a very long book – was very sad, but by then Amy had been to a few funerals, so it really resonated with her.  And by the time Harry got all snotty in Order of the Phoenix, Amy was starting to creep into her teenaged years, and hated the book because Harry was mirroring her own uncomfortable rebellion.  And then there’s the really big death in Half-Blood Prince, which by then Amy was coming to realize that anyone could die and was starting to come to terms with her own mortality, and then by the time the final book came out she was pretty much done with high school.
I think of what eight-year-old Amy, scared of the basilisk, would have thought of the terrors at the end of Half-Blood Prince.  I wonder if little Amy would have related at all to the comparatively plot-free antics of Harry in Order of the Phoenix – would it have emotionally resonated with her?
No, the specialness of Harry Potter is that for her entire childhood, Amy had a book series that grew up with her.  Just as she matured, Harry did, and together they walked a path.  I know for a fact that Amy found it comforting that Harry struggled with some of the things she did, even if she never articulated it as such – but if the Boy Who Lived had to worry about dating and felt awkward and didn’t know what to do sometimes, well, that’s why she clung to those books.
Now, I have no doubt some parents will try to dole out Harry Potter one year at a time, reading the next one as a birthday present – and this is wise, even if it’s doomed to fail.  (Too many movies out there, son, and too many friends with DVD players.)  But I think pouring all of Harry Potter into a kid at any age is going to be a little disappointing – at thirteen, they may find the beginning books a little too twee, and at Amy’s age they may find Dumbledore’s journey in the cave to be uncomfortably terrifying.
I think Harry Potter will be around for a while.  But I also think there’s a good chance that we literally got the magic of an age, and in a hundred years Harry will be one of those beloved classics that adults will read for pleasure, but the kids will have moved on to something else.
That’s fine.  Not everything has to last for the ages.

Facebook Selfishness, Redux

Yesterday, when I yelled at people for being selfishly rude on Facebook, I got some comments that went roughly like this:
“Well, Ferrett, Facebook’s UI is terrible.  It doesn’t present everything in chronological order!  That confuses people!  You can’t blame people for being baffled by that.”
Yes.
Yes, I can.
This is Facebook, arguably the single most popular application in the world today.  More people use it than anything else aside from, possibly, a web browser (and the number of people who access it through apps may change that).  And anyone who has more than ten friends knows that Facebook doesn’t present everything, and doesn’t always present them in order.  Hell, my blind mother who logs into Facebook once a week to check in on me knows that, and she’s got like fifteen friends total.  And is, you know, blind.
Furthermore, the question of whether the UI is terrible is up in the air.  Facebook presenting everything in chronological order has its own downsides, because once you reach a certain level of friends – say, 100, which is pretty low for anyone who’s been through college and high school in this day and age – the chatty Facebook people drown out the people you like, and you never see the people you care about again.  So if Facebook’s admittedly non-optimized attempts to bubble the important updates to the top is bad UI, then so is chronological order, as it’s a very understandable and reasonable design choice that will never show you what you actually want.
(Not that Facebook’s status-bumping algorithm is good, mind you, but I understand it’s a very complex challenge to try to figure out what things I want to see from which of my friends.  I’m surprised they manage it at all.)
Further to the furtherest furthermore, if you look at the idiots who do this sort of thing, they’re usually Facebook natives.  Yes, I’d forgive my mother for being confused by this, but in general when I see this irritation, I click through to the idiot who did it and lo!  S/he has 800 friends and is constantly posting on people’s walls and oh, here’s seventeen pictures of their last fun run.  Either they know what’s going on, and can’t be bothered, or they’re such a fucking moron that they use this thing every day and are still confused by how it works, in which case their slug-like intellect approaches levels of discourtesy.
Look, English Grammar is also complicated.  But I don’t really cut people all that much slack for typing “U no its not rite wen ur GF cheets on U,” and that’s not even adding more stress to anyone in a stressful position.  If someone’s just posted something obviously bad, the least you can do for a friend in time in need is learn how to use a fucking program that you should probably know how to use already.  It’s not rocket science.
Wanna call me an elitist?  Go ahead.  But if you are, you’re lowering the bar for “public Internet usage” to the point where malformed mice can hop over it, because this isn’t elitism; it’s courtesy.

Vote For Pedro, Redux

Apparently, my clerical coming-of-age-via-a-stabbing story “My Father’s Wounds” has made it to the final round of the “Best Of Beneath Ceaseless Skies, Year Three” poll.  Which is amazing!  I’m glad to see people liked it.
Now, the run-off is on a Facebook poll, where I am getting thoroughly trounced by Michael John Grist’s “Bone Diamond” and Heather Clitheroe’s “Gone Sleeping,” both of which are excellent stories.  But if you liked “My Father’s Wounds,” and feel so motivated, and have a Facebook account, then please go hither and vote.
(Side Note #1: I idly considered having Opposite Cat vote in the poll, but Opposite Cat mostly reads nonfiction.)
(Side Note #2: I really hate it when someone votes for someone just because they like the person in it, not because what s/he did was good.  It’s like, “Oh, my friend is in this beauty contest, vote for her!”  No, really, vote for her if you see her and she’s pretty to you.  Likewise, if you didn’t like “My Father’s Wounds,” or didn’t read it, kindly abstain.  That would just irk me.)