Less Vitriol, More Empathy: A Word To Complaining Fans

Whenever someone bitches about how stupid the creators are for producing a terrible movie, I think of Star Wars.  Not Star Wars, the global sensation that’s been around for thirty years – but Star Wars, the over-budget mess in mid-production, staffed by no-name actors, directed by the guy who’d had only one decent movie in the can.
If you read the interviews with the actors, they all went out after filming every day and got hammered.  And why not?  By day, you’re reading terrible, stilted dialog while the director screams at you: “Faster!  And more intense!”  You don’t see the special effects; you’re on a wooden screen, knowing the studio wants to shut this production down.  You don’t hear the John Williams music doing half the emotional work for you.  All you know is that this crazy maniac is telling you that all your attempts to emote lines like “How could I be so stupid? He’s nowhere in sight. Blast it!” aren’t sufficient while idiots in white plated armor are firing imaginary guns at you.
Why wouldn’t you drink?
Why wouldn’t you think this movie was the end of your career?
And even then, you’re wrong.  I know you’re thinking, “Well, it was all a success after that,” but… The movie that George Lucas directed did bomb.  The unsung hero of Star Wars is the film editor, who realized the initial cut was about twenty minutes too long, and went back and sped up the film to helter-skelter speeds – because the minute you had a second to pause and think about things, the whole thing fell apart.  The initial few cuts were legendary failures, and everyone in Hollywood was kissing George Lucas’ career goodbye.
The reason I say this is because I work in a couple of creative fields – I write stories, and I handle Magic: the Gathering cards as my day job.  And whenever something isn’t particularly, there’s this entitled, sneering reaction from the fans.  They leave comments over and over again with the same basic premise: “God, you’re so fucking stupid.  Fixing it’s so easy.  Why didn’t you just do X?”
Because it’s not that simple when you’re in the middle of the damn thing, that’s why.
Look, if we could all write glorious stories of magnificent heartbreak every time, we would.  But the creative process is really very complicated.  You’re complaining with the fresh sight of retrospect.  Scott Kurtz, author of webcomic PVP, once said that you couldn’t really critique a webcomic until you’d done one.  At the time, I disagreed strongly.  Once I had a year of producing a webcomic under my belt, well, I wasn’t so certain.
It’s not that you can’t critique – hell, you absolutely should.  I spent this week slamming Prometheus for failing absolutely on all but an allegorical level.  But when you critique, you shouldn’t take the attitude that the creative process is simple… And particularly not if you’ve never made anything and thrown your darling out to a crowd of angry, ungrateful people to be savaged.
When the project is done, it’s easy to look back and see what could have done better.  But in the middle of things, when you’re looking at a half-blank slate and the world is full of ten thousand choices, it’s hard to fathom that this one choice is the critical one.  Or perhaps – and this is the thing that the people who think “it’s simple” never get – that you made a hundred very good choices, more than most people ever do, enough to catapult your film/book/card game/music past the realms of “stuff that no one pays attention to” and into the realm of “good enough to for many people to like” – and in the process of making those hundred choices absolutely correctly, the one that stopped it from being pure genius got by you.
And maybe – just maybe – it’s possible that as a creator, you make a film/book/card game/music that absolutely satisfies you, but doesn’t hit anyone else’s good points.  That happens.  A lot.  And if you’re sitting there squalling because the creator should have “known better,” then maybe you should try creating stuff that’s perfect for you, and see the horrifying variance in reactions when your “perfect” product hits the shelves.
That’s not to say you shouldn’t criticize.  If Promethus sucks, well, it failed.  If something I write doesn’t win every award, well, it’s worthwhile to point out why my stories didn’t pan out.  But what you should not do is to treat the whole thing as a big ball of rage, as if we purposely set out to annoy you when making it.
We didn’t.  We wanted to make beauty.  Something got in the way, and we’re sorry… But if this was as easy as you think, then everyone would do it.

Two Videos You Need To See. Now.

Okay, I’ve gone off on my love of Epic Rap Battles of History before, but this Bill Gates vs. Steve Jobs is approaching Weird Al levels of magnificence. Nice Peter is totally on his game here, and this is actually just a damned good rap.

Then really, this is one of the best goddamned mashups I’ve heard in quite some time – Third Eye Blind vs. Carly Rae Jepsen. It’s actually kind of eerie how well this works.

Chivalry Is Dead. Thank God.

Over on FetLife, there’s a kerfluffle about whether Submissives should be:
a) Warriors in paid service to the Great Dom-King but not beholden to him, able to leave if the Dom-King goes mad;
b) Knights in absolute and permanent service to their Lord the Dom-King;
c) Ronin actively scornful of the Great Dom-Emperor, because you can’t expect to wield supreme executive power just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at you.
No, seriously.  There’s a lot of talk about how there’s much to learn from the fine, courtly manners of the Middle-Aged Royalty…. Which, you know, wasprobably a lot closer to Game of Thrones in many respects than the soft-focus lens of King Arthur.
And hey, there may be some good stuff to be found in that morass of debate, because a lot of damaged people find themselves drawn to submission… and then they have these bad instincts that lead them to become abused by someone who’s out to actively weaken them.  A framework that helps them to understand when it’s right to walk away from a toxic relationship probably has some benefit.
But what’s  interesting to me is that recently, our local poly group had a discussion on Hard Limits and Dealbreakers.  And you know what one of my dealbreakers is?
Calling yourself a knight, or a warrior, or a poet-warrior, or anything where you’re basically telling the world how chivalrous and upstanding you are.
I’m sure there are some nice dudes out there who go to great lengths to explain to random passerby the nature of their moral compass… but in general, the people I’ve met who’ve yammered on about their stern ethics and their need to follow the warrior principles were the biggest torrents of vinegar-scented water I’ve ever seen.  I mean, like a torrent of douche.  A waterfall of douche.  An ocean of douche, endlessly falling through a hole into the Pit Of Eternal Douche.
The folks I knew who seriously wanted to be a Ronin or a Knight or such were basically the kind of people who thought: “What I really want is to live in a world where the strongest guy with a weapon got to take whatever he wanted, but then had to make these optional, artificial rules to play nice.”  Which I think was a sign of the doucheitude of those folks: deep down, they wish the world was constructed so you know, they didn’t have to rape, and pillage and burn, but nobody’d really be strong enough to stop them if they wanted to.
And usually, that’s exactly what they did when the shit got tough.  Oh, they’d sometimes hold tight to their so-called ethics for years… but when the right piece of ass presented itself or the promotion they wanted involved fucking someone else over, the core Ayn Randian philosophy surged to the fore: If you really deserved to keep it, you’d have been stronger.
Then they’d talk even louder about their nobility, like a gay Republican caught in the bathroom yelling about his love for his wife.
Plus, there’s often this weird misogyny threaded throughout chivalrous thought, which kind of goes like this: Women are so inferior to me, that I must remember to protect them at all times and treat them with great respect.  I’d like to take the party line here and tell you how the chivalrous guys really idolize women… but I remember an argument on FetLife with a “chivalrous” guy, wherein several women said that they found the whole door-holding, chair-shoving thing to be off-putting and infantalizing, and the guy all but patted them on the head and said, “Well, the real women I know like it, so I’m just gonna keep on doing that.”
Yes.  You’re very noble and chivalrous, not treating women as individuals, but rather a class of people who you can choose preferences for.  (And that’s not to say that you couldn’t defend it with “More people like it than not, so it’s a reasonable default until I know better,” but his argument was of the “No true Scotsman” sort where any woman who didn’t appreciate his savvy charms wasn’t deserving of the title “woman.”  In other words, as a woman you’re completely worthy of my respect until you mouth the fuck off.)
To me, that’s why I don’t like chivalry: it’s got this toxic undercurrent of We are the secret masters of the universe, and must be kind to our lessers.  If you were really big on chivalry, you wouldn’t be expecting these huge plates of cookies every time you helped a woman with her package… you’d be doing it because you were a genuinely nice guy who helps people.  And you wouldn’t be watching for women in need, you’d be looking for people in need.  Not because you’re so superior you must maintain it via constant vigilance and acts of nobility, but because you’re as human as anyone else and realizes that everyone needs a hand.
Don’t get me wrong.  Not everyone in the SCA is foaming at the douche.  I know a lot of nice guys who can wail the fuck out of me with their armor on.  But when I sit down to dinner with them, they don’t feel the urge to spew molten philosophy all over me about how chivalry and nobility and hey, is that a little ego dribbling down your chin?  They just sit down and do the right thing, and when the conversation turns to them they don’t discuss all the fine ways they believe they are changing the world.
So no, personally speaking, in my bedroom I don’t want a King, or a Knight, or a Warrior, or a Samurai or a Rogue-Ninja-Wizard triple-classed because of their half-elf parentage.  What I’d like is someone who thinks that goodness is not something that has to be defined in terms of hierarchy, where if we all just got onto the battlefield and slugged it out we’d determine who was best suited.
Most of the kings who ruled were kind of shitty.  I could do without trying to recreate that today, y’know?
(And I write this knowing damn well that every person who reads this will tell me, “I have never broken my word, ever.”  Yes, I’m sure you’re a wonderful person.  But the kind of douche I’m speaking of goes to great goddamned lengths to tell me how honorable s/he is, even as s/he is stabbing someone in the back.)

No Time For Love, Dr. Jones… Well, Maybe In Text Form

Finishing up a huge project for today, but over at FetLife (TheFacebookforKinksters), I wrote a humor essay on a neglected topic: How To Be A Super-Duper Ninja Sex Texter.
The obligatory sample:

So! You want to make people masturbate to thoughts of you, using only your phone. And yet whenever you text, “I STICK IT IN. I STICK IT IN!!!!!” you get nothing but awkward silences.
Possibly because this is because you accidentally sexted your mother. Or possibly it is because you do not know the secrets of effective sexting. And you know who knows all the secrets of effective sexting? Not me. Shit, that’s a deep well, dude. There’s like ten million ways to get someone off with your mind and an unlimited data plan.
…but I know a few.

The essay’s over here, and actually contains some pretty salient tips on writing customized erotica.  So go check it out, if you’re interested.  Ask questions.  Kick the tires, you know how it is.

It's A Floor Wax, It's A Dessert Topping, It's Prometheus: A Spoiler-Sensitive Review

Before we can discuss Prometheus, I must first give a brief history lesson on Frustrating Science-Fiction Movies That Panned Out.
Now, when Blade Runner came out, it was widely viewed as an incomprehensible failure – critically panned.  The motivations for the lead characters baffled people – fortunately, the film had a clear line for villanous Replicant Roy Batty, who wanted “more life, father,” but people were wondering why the fuck Deckard was so mean towards poor Rachel.  I’d like to say the clues were all there, but they weren’t.  They were subliminal, beneath the surface.  Few people really knew what the fuck was happening until the Director’s Cut of 1991 gave us a dream sequence and an origami unicorn that told us, “Hey!  Deckard’s a Replicant!”
It was all there from the start…. except who the fuck could interpret it?  But, you know, some people like lots of ambiguousness in their sci-fi.
Likewise, the ending of 2001: A Space Odyssey was often viewed as senseless eye candy for stoners… And it was.  But if you watched the movie a lot, or read the Arthur C. Clarke book that explained it all, then repeated viewing did reward you with a series of events that turned out to have a rather wondrous coherency.
Yet those are the exceptions.  For every 2001, there’s a hundred lesser films that looked to have a shit ending that didn’t hang together, and lo!  It seriously did not.  On the other hand, we have a genius director in the form of Ridley Scott, who’s kind of famed for being smarter than his audience.  On the gripping hand, we have Damon Lindelof, who’s famed for flinging up his hands and going, “It was about the experience, man, not the explanation!  Don’t get so hung up on, you know, a logical cause and effect!”
So.  Prometheus is getting a lot of flack because it didn’t make any sense.  So is it a hot mess, or a cunningly-plotted movie that will reward the viewer for digging deeper?
The good news: It’s both!
If you’re confused by Prometheus, Adrian Bott explains the aliens’ motivations to you – including the driving force of their culture, the reason why they created us, and the reason why they then turned it around and wanted to kill us.  (WARNING: Link involves both spoilers and Space Jesus. No, seriously, Space Jesus.)  And viewed from this lens, Prometheus’ overarching story (the creation of both us and the Aliens) makes perfect sense, the kind of subtle storytelling that really functions in a long-term sense.
So yes!  It all comes together.  In the long run.
In the short run, the run that’s underneath a gigantic spaceship tumbling out of mid-air, Prometheus makes no sense at all.
Prometheus is that rare movie where the aliens’ motivations ultimately make more sense than the humans.  Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate what Prometheus is trying to do: by keeping the characters’ motivations oblique to us, it’s trying to saturate us with a sense of mystery and concern, because every moment on the screen could reveal something new about the crew.  It’s trying so hard to pull off that trick of making every bit of character in media res, which keeps us on our toes.
Unfortunately, this fails if the characters don’t have consistent motivations, or use.  And that’s exactly what happens in Prometheus… In particular to Charlize Theron, where the entire film would have functioned exactly the same if she were off the ship.  (As my smartie wife points out, she does two things that someone else would have had to do anyway, and one inexplicable thing with the Captain that distracts him from something he couldn’t have done anything about anyway.)
I mean, seriously (mild spoilers ahoy!), you have the guy who plotted the map, who yells how he’s out of his depth and wants to go back to the spaceship, and then wanders off with his buddy to get conveniently lost?  You have a biologist who apparently trained at the Steve Irwin Institute Of Fuckology, whose reaction to the first living alien being he’s ever encountered is to poke at it?  You have an entire crew of people who’ve been hauled out for a four-year mission in cryosleep, and they not only do not know why they’re going, but they have never met each other, even incidentally, on the way to their cryosleep chambers?  You have a lead character who inspired this whole goddamned mission into space, who desperately believes the aliens can [ACTION REDACTED], and it’s never explained WHY exactly he’s so confident the aliens will [ACTION REDACTED] that he spends a trillion dollars on an expedition to nowhere?  And whoa, look how happy the Captain is at the end!
The problem with Prometheus is that we have characters acting in completely random ways.  I think that Tobias Buckell nailed it when he said that the reason the first two Alien films worked so well was that everyone in them worked so hard to stay alive in a character-driven context.  Yes, often their actions were suicidal in retrospect, but given a) what the characters knew and b) what their ultimate goals were, it made perfect sense that such a mass of fuckery would erupt.  Since we don’t understand what the half-drawn characters in Prometheus want to do right up until the moment that they do it, we as the audience are frustrated because it’s a big shaky ladder of “Why did they do that?” and then we have to extrapolate the reasons why.  Which isn’t satisfying, and doesn’t hold itself up to poking nearly as well as Scott and Lindelof think it does.
On the other hand – and this is a big hand – Prometheus is fucking pretty.  The shots are gorgeous.  The visual effects are new and stunning and certainly worth your popcorn money.  I could watch it again just to have my eyes fed pretty pretty candy.  But on the gripping hand, it’s also not a particularly scary movie – there’s one terrifying sequence in the middle involving staples, but mostly the terror isn’t there because hey, these guys are getting killed by SFX, look at that.  Hey, look at it.  Dopes getting meat-ground.
The good news is that Prometheus does inspire debate.  It’s a challenging movie, which is rare these days.  Unfortunately, it’s challenging like the pissy bouncer at a bad club, where you get this feeling of initial triumph of getting past him, and then discovering that the club itself is shabby with overpriced drinks.
Prometheus is worth seeing.  It’s a very, very hot mess, the kind where you’re nearly glad you bedded hir.  But then you walk away feeling your self-esteem’s been a little corroded.
Your spoiler discussions may now commence. I’m certainly going to list some complaints in my first comment.  (And if the title confuses you, watch this old SNL skit.)