Bring On The Bad Guys!

If you’re going to date people, you need to get used to being the bad guy.
Not that you should set out to be a black-hatted villain in your relationships, of course.  But as my Momma always said, “If you act like a rug, don’t be surprised to find feet on your face.”* People will, unthinkingly, take what you give them.  If you cancel a night out with the boys to spend it at home with her, she’ll think that the boys couldn’t have meant that much to you.  If hate to interrupt him because he’s blathering on and on and you don’t want to be rude, he’ll think that you’re naturally quiet.
Hence, you need to patrol your boundaries, politely and with a sense of self-investigation, to make sure that people aren’t disrespecting you.
Thing about boundaries is that if they’re violated enough times, and you can’t convince them to stop, then you eventually have to take dramatic action – usually in terms of leaving that person’s company.  And that’s good!  You don’t want to hang around someone who cheats on you, or insults you in front of company, or even just buys a cat you didn’t want and then leaves you to clean up the litterbox.
Problem is, one person’s reasonable request is another person’s threat.  Nobody’s the bad guy in their own story – which leaves you as the villain.  Your “stop insulting me in front of other people” is their “Christ, they don’t know how to take a joke.”  Your “I don’t like cleaning the litter box for an animal I did not request” is her “They hate animals, and are stupid clean freaks.”
And, of course, when you stop seeing them because of things they did, you’re automatically the bad guy.  After all, you left them for some dumb problem nobody else would have cared about!  You destroyed a healthy friendship over something trivial!  I mean, if this was a real problem, they would have fixed it, right?
That means you’re the jerk.
I blame movies for what happens next: you want a sense of closure.  You want that courtroom scene where you face down your enemy, hair wet from the thunderstorm outside, and convince them not only that you were completely justified, but that they should be ashamed of what they did!
Too many people can’t leave without having the story be about them becoming the hero of both people’s stories.  Without their former friend seeing the light, and repenting.
You might as well quit your job and buy tickets at the lottery, man.
So you stay, and you keep fighting in this horrid relationship, and you feel the guilt because s/he thinks I’m bad, there must be something to that, and you wind up in this decaying, ugly relationship with someone who doesn’t respect you.
What’s the solution?
Did you read my first sentence?
Be the bad guy.  Don’t require them to acknowledge your correctness.  Be confident that you know this is disrespectful behavior, and you would feel lessened if you stayed with someone who did that.  Don’t aim for that magnificent sense of closure, because you’ll get it – just not the closure of “S/he agrees with me,” but the scorched-earth closure of apocalyptic battles and eternal enemies.
Walk away.  They’ll think you’re bad.  So what?  Is this their story, or yours?
Be confident that your needs have worth, and that you’re not going to pull the trigger unless it’s that hurtful to you.  Be careful friending new people, lest they wriggle in like this.  And be good.
* – Okay, my Momma didn’t say that.  Nor do I refer to her as “My Momma.”  In fact, I made this up on the spot.  But I was so proud of the way it sounded, I needed to attribute it elsewhere to give it that well-worn patina of “Timeless advice.”

The Triumph Of Self-Publishing

So-called “professional” writers tend to look down on self-published authors, thinking that they’re just clods writing “DICK ENTERS THE ROOM AND SAYS HI LINDA LINDA BE MAD AT DICK” novels on butcher paper in crayon.  But though the perception of self-publishing is that of a bunch of Harry Potter fanfic writers wanking it to Hermione’s freshly-grown wand, the truth is that self-publishing offers a freedom that no one else can offer.  Freed from the restraints of having to actually, you know, make money, self-publishers can offer titles that no traditional publisher would touch with a ten-foot pole.
Or, in this case, a ten-foot pole covered in a condom.
That’s right; if you’ve been thinking, “I love it when my partner jizzes all over my face – now, how can I combine that subtle aroma with pancetta and a nice rosė?” thankfully, the fine folks at Lulu have, er, come through for you.  Fotie Photenhauer’s Natural Harvest – A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes is now available for a mere $24.95.
Notes the book: ” Like fine wine and cheeses, the taste of semen is complex and dynamic. Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food.”
One finds it hard to imagine why semen hasn’t caught on in restaurants.  I think we all would like to gulp down the potentially STD-laden load of our waiter, mixed with some asparagus and perhaps a dusting of saffron, so when someone asks, “Why are your lips so covered in sores you can’t speak without bits of your philtrum flaking off?” you can say with pride, “I, madam, am a gourmet.”
After all, as Fotie says: “Some tend to dismiss semen as food and describe it as bitter or salty. This is similar to a person who tastes wine for the first time [and] says it tastes sour. Like all other foods, the tastes and aromas of semen open up and are better appreciated when you are able to compare and discuss the different tastes with other connoisseurs.”
If that’s not the classiest blowbang I’ve ever seen, I don’t know what is.
As it turns out, this book of squirty enjoyment has sold over 25,000 copies, so my hat is off to Fotie!  She found a need and, er, filled it.  This truly is an example of what people can do when they set their heads to it.  I think this is just proof that traditional publishing is going down.

Blogging About Blogging Is A Sin, Part 1: FetLife And LiveJournal

FetLife gave me a sad reminder of what a vibrant social network looks like.  Or, more accurately, what LJ used to be.
On Thursday, I posted my essay “So I’m Going To Be A Dom” to FetLife, a light little humor essay I tossed off in fifteen minutes.  After some consideration, I cross-posted it to my blog – and, more relevantly, LiveJournal.
What happened was that it went up on LJ, got 36 comments (a third of which were mine), and promptly hit the black hole of Yesterday’s Content.
On FetLife, it got about thirty comments (each expressing “breadcrumbs,” the Fet term for “I make a comment here because I think you’ll want to read this,” as each comment posted shows up on someone’s friends feed unless you specifically mute comments) before it hit Kinky & Popular on Friday.
Kinky and Popular is Fet’s automated “Best Of Fet” collation system, where once a post/picture/video hits a certain popularity it gets to their global feed.  I went viral (for the second time).  By the time Friday was over, I had 220+ comments and 163 people “loving” it, each getting it out to a greater audience.
Now, the popularity is, in part, due to audience.  I mean, it is a kink site, and since I’m mocking the Dom stereotypes, writing something that reflects their annoyances means that it’s going to be a bigger hit in a kink-focused community than the more-scattered audience of my LiveJournal.
But part of that’s due to LJ’s lack of social networking infrastructure.  Yeah, friends lists were great back in the day… But LJ’s lack of a “trending topics” or “share this post without reblogging it entirely” or a “User <3s this essay or comment” means that basically, there’s no inherent mechanisms for easily sharing your love of a given topic.  (I mean, you can add a “+1 on Google+/Reshare on Twitter/Link on Facebook button manually, but that’s something each user has to manually do.)
LiveJournal’s stagnated technologically.  They used to be the leading edge; now, it seems that they’re behind the curve.  And you can go, “Oh, but I like the fact that it doesn’t spam me with all sorts of muck I don’t want!”, which is fair, but it means that some really good gems of writing get completely lost unless someone chooses to make an entry specifically linking to it.
Add that to the fact that LJ’s audience seems to have wandered off in search of better options. Yes, I obviously love the long-blog topic, but the fact is that most people seem to think that writing five paragraphs is onerous.  You can hate Twitter’s popularity – but really, that 140-character limit works because most people don’t have that much to say.  “Here’s a photo I liked.”  “I’m sad because I got fired today.”  “You know what’s still awesome?  Buffy.”
This vomiting of words and shaping them into an essay seems kind of antiquated.  Maybe it’s time to admit that the vast majority of people see writing as a task and not a joy, and for them putting their thoughts into an essay is a painful and trepidacious project.  As such, a huge text field is a lot more intimidating than a tiny status box.
Someone once posited that LJ was in part dying because of all the x-fail shitstorms flying around the Internet – that once everyone saw how many people could be pointed at a poorly written blog post to be dissected by angry people, folks said, “Shit, I don’t want to be in the middle of that” and skedaddled.  I don’t know if that’s true, mainly because I don’t think most people are aware of the X-fail shitstorms – and of those who are, most of them were long-form blog writers who were already aware of the dangers.  Still, it’s a lot easier to make an ass out of yourself in a Facebook status post, where the worst that happens is that your friends mock you and maybe someone takes a screenshot with blurred names and faces and posts it to a Facebook FAIL site.
I think that’s a contributing factor, though.  LJ, unless you go friends-only, is out to the world.  Facebook’s just for your friends.  People would mostly prefer to just talk to their friends.  I’m baffled when someone’s bent out of shape by one of those mean comments when a stranger wanders across their essay – I mean, you don’t know this dude, why should you give a shit about whether he’s angry at you or not? – but I’ve seen it enough to know it’s a phenomenon I can’t dismiss.
I dunno.  The English side of LJ seems smaller these days, held together by a handful of bold (and old) personalities who keep people here by force of will alone.
I mean, I remember when I could toss off a silly essay and return to 150+ comments back in 2006, simply by dint of more people being here.  And comments don’t equal love, or quality, but it certainly does match my level of interest – I’m on here to interact with people, dammit, and there are a lot fewer people hanging out, for whatever reasons they may be.
I’m still enjoying my time here because I love the people who are still here with a fierceness that surprises me.  But I can foresee when this becomes the mySpace of the Internet – some backwater place where folks are surprised to see anyone there.  It may be there already.
Meanwhile, on Fet, I’m interacting a lot more.  There are more pictures, more posts, more local people I know.  Maybe that’s the kinky nature of it.  But at least on Friday, it felt alive in a way that LJ doesn’t, and that bothers me.

So I'm Going To Become A Dom

(NOTE: I originally posted this at FetLife as a humor piece, but figured it was amusing enough to post over here.  We’ll see how it goes.)
Looking over the FetLife profiles, it seems like “Dom” is the ideal career choice for the older gentleman who wants to get laid… So imagine my thrill! Here I am at 42, starting to pick up the whip! I thought my sexual career was over, but here I have at least another decade left in me!
Alas, I don’t have the look. I’m gonna need the look to get the babes. At least according to what I’m seeing on FetLife.
First thing I have to do is stop all of this inopportune smiling. I must always fix the camera with a steely glare, as though the camera was very naughty and needed to be punished. Perhaps, occasionally, rarely, a smirk may peek from the corner of my mouth, as though I am faintly amused at all of your frantic antics. But not often. For guffawing is not the realm of the True Dom.
Doms do not smileyface in texts. Ever. You can tell. Doms are SRS BUSNESS.
Next, I need to either scale up or scale down. Right now I’m a middlin’ tub o’lard – decent arms, beer belly, man-tits of maybe an A-cup. When I jog, things go swinging, but not enough to hit me in the face.
Ah! But the True Doms seem to come in one of two flavors. Either they’re elderly and musclebound, with that sort of workout fiber that says “MY FLESH WANTS TO SAG, BUT I STAPLE IT TO THIS HE-MAN PHYSIQUE SO ALL YOU NOTICE ARE SLIGHT RIPPLES OVER MY ROCK-HARD ABS.” Then I just wear a hat and leather chaps and wander around all day baring my gray-haired chest at people like it was Superman’s S.
Or I go the other route – gain a hundred pounds. Just get that big ol’ torture-room belly where I eventually look like the Rancor keeper, the look that says, “See that? Fuck you, society. I look like this, and I’m still gonna walk around in a loincloth. Because I don’t play by YOUR RULES. I am so confident that I will redefine cultural hotness just by LOOKING AT YOU, a black hole of expectation-twisting manliness!”
Then, of course, I have to shave my head. Can’t be a big ol’ torturer without a smooth pate.
Look how wrong my default picture is! No True Dom would ever have a default picture showing a lemur on his head. No, that lemur is topping me, my smile showing that I’m too willing to please, my face either too flabby or not flabby enough. I need a gaunt picture of me, perhaps at an SCA festival, impassively wrestling a lemur to the ground to show it who’s boss. THAT’S a Dom shot.
Then again, my photos are all wrong. The big problem? They’re of me. True Doms are all Leica experts, people who spend a lot of time in the darkroom perfecting glorious photos and videos of their subs. The goal of a True Dom isn’t to show what they look like, but rather to show off their attractive collection of half-naked women, a kind of fleshy charm-bracelet to jangle at other potential subs. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, this club’s full of hot women, and you could be a part of it! Fill out this application, we’ll talk to the bouncer. You can be a part of my kinky Borg collective.”
Of course, that means as a True Dom Old Guy, I’ll need to assemble my squadron of hard-bodied twenty-three-year-olds. They’re obligatory. You can’t get into the official Dom Resting Room at the airport without them (which is a lovely secret chamber to rest in between flights, with a St. Andrew’s cross and cigars and kneeling waitresses). I’ll need to get about seven or eight of them, perhaps hanging around the graduation ceremonies at Florida State University to try to pick some up on their way out the door.
Okay, sure, maybe there’s something a little weird in mackin’ on someone five years’ younger than my daughter, but here’s the trick: All those young women with the smoking hot bodies and the uncertainty inherent of being in your early twenties and not sure where you want to go with your life and the sexy pouty mouths and the willingness to try anything for the first time?
They’re all very mature for their age.
Truth, man. Every one of them, amazingly, is not just model-hot and willing to try anything at least once, but by some bizarre coincidence they’ve all got this intense wisdom that makes them, oh, just really so much smarter than everyone else their age. Except for these seven other identically-hot women over here of the same age that I happen to be playing with, they’re also all strangely wise beyond their years and also model-hot. But you? You’re special. Here, have a glass of good wine.
So yeah. I’m doin’ it wrong. I need to start bulking up one way or the other, and wrassle a lemur, and remove all these inconvenient smiling pictures. Then I’ll be on my way to a lifetime of hot babe-sex. What could be better?
Domminess, here I come.

More On #OccupyWallStreet

Despite appearances, this essay’s about #OccupyWallSt.
Now.  I’m in a bad mood because my work day has been yet another tangle of “This documentation tells me this will work, but it doesn’t” and people changing their minds willy-nilly, causing me to have to reprogram entire modules because they can’t decide how things should function.
Furthermore, I’m working in the kind of code where I have to concentrate.  And Gini’s the sort of person who, despite years of getting better about it, still sees me on the couch, thinks “Couch is not work,” and will jar me out of programmer-space me without so much as a by-your-leave to tell me about some internet meme.
So when Gini barges into my concentration for the third time today to ask me if I’ve seen so-and-so’s post on cheesemaking, I:
a)  Say “JESUS CHRIST, WHAT THE FUCK WOMAN, I’M WORKING HERE, CAN’T YOU FUCKING GET IT THROUGH YOUR THICK SKULL?  IT’S BEEN YEARS, YOU SHOULD KNOW THE LOOK ON MY FACE.”
b)  Snap, “Working.  Now.  See?” and point at the computer to let her know just what an idiot she is.
c)  Shake off the rage, which isn’t really her fault, and quietly point out that I am working, sweetie, and you’ve interrupted me twice today, and if you don’t stop that I’m probably going to eventually snap at you in a way I’ll regret.  Please respect my space.
The correct answer, of course, is C…. But it’s also the least satisfying.  I don’t get to have the Tower of Righteous Rage, I don’t get to make her feel as crappy as I do, I don’t get the satisfaction of the dramatic apology I might (miiiight) get if I made a much bigger deal of this.
On the other hand, I don’t have to apologize later, and I don’t make her feel as crappy as I do, and she doesn’t pack her bags and leave after I pull that shit enough times.  So there’s that.
The lesson here, children, is one of those big fundaments of life: The right move is not necessarily the satisfying move.  It’s said that in diplomacy, a good compromise often makes both parties feel as though they didn’t get what they wanted.  And they didn’t.  But they got more than if they’d went to war, and probably lost.
The reason I bring this up is because I just got a comment that read:

So I’m doing a little teeth-grinding here, Ferrett.
Because at what point is something going to count as doing something?
You’ve previously posted, grouchy about people who make Tweets or posts or whatever in solidarity with something because they weren’t out doing anything.
Well? Now people are out doing something, and you STILL are saying they aren’t doing anything. At what point will it count? What has to be done for it to count as “doing something?” People are doing what they can; why isn’t it enough? Why can’t you/we not recognize that you don’t go from nothing to everything in a snap?

That’s an incorrect summary of my position.
I wasn’t grouchy because they weren’t out doing anything.
I was grouchy because they weren’t doing anything effective.
Too much of activism is about what feels satisfying, and not what’s actually effective.  One of the reasons I laud MLK is that he said, “Hey, you know what, we could yell a lot and be ignored, but frankly, these people are going to go out of business if we stop patronizing them.  Let’s be respectful enough that we always look meek and noble in the press, and behind the scenes we fucking squeeze their throats until they choke.”
That wasn’t satisfying, I’m sure, taking the upper hand as much of the time.  I’m sure rioting is a lot more satisfying.  But it would have just gotten everyone jailed.
Now, at this point, I’m glad that #OccupyWallSt is raising big questions; that’s great.  Whether they’re actually going to be effective in the long term in achieving their goals is another matter.  And I’m concerned that it’s going to turn into some big ball of everyone getting their satisfaction on by making a big stink and hanging around in crowds and waving signs, and in the end getting actually no legislation passed. (And hey, they’re not rioting and causing bad press.  Good job!)
I can recognize that we don’t go from nothing to everything in a snap.  But I can also recognize, for I have seen, protest groups dwindle into irrelevance because they’re more concerned about feeling good than doing what’s effective.
As such, for me to ask, “Hey, is this actually working?” is not only a question you shouldn’t be grinding your teeth over, but one that should be foremost in your fucking mind when you’re looking at it.  I’ve seen groups whose sole goal’s been to get the word out, and they got plenty of that word out, and nobody fucking cared.  I don’t deny they’re doing something.  But what are they actually doing?
As I said, I want to be proven wrong.  Maybe this evolves into something more significant than a bunch of people getting together, feeling good, and walking away with exactly the same legislation and power structure that was here when they got here.  Maybe the questions take root and make real change.  I am, at least, heartened to see consistent nationwide protests about this sort of thing, which is more than has been done in recent memory for any non-war-related activity that I can imagine.
But what I see from here is an awful lot of satisfaction in the form of “YEAH WE’RE HERE YOU SHOULD BE TOO, IT’S AWESOME” and comparatively little effectiveness in the form of “THIS IS WHAT WE THINK WOULD FIX THINGS, GO DO THAT.”
As such, I’m never going to stop asking, “Well, is this working?”  And neither should you.