So What Podcasts Have I Liked? A Bunch Of Small Reviews.

A while back, I did a secret test of you folks.  I wrote an entry saying, “It’s funny, I know nothing about how to listen to podcasts, or even where to download them.  This is like starting over technologically.”
And I waited.
Sure enough, people treated this observation as though I had desperately, urgently, requested a list of the finest podcasts in the land.  The comment threads were filled with, “Well, I like” and “You should listen to…” as people flooded me with ZOMG NIGHTVALE WHY ARE YOU NOT LISTENING NOW.
This is not necessarily a bad thing.  But it’s just proof that people are a high-pressure hose of barely-repressed recommendations, just looking for the vaguest excuse to spray your face sopping with whatever they like.  And people aren’t particularly picky about their recommendations, generally, as witness last night when I said, “So what short (20 minutes or less) podcasts can you recommend?” and a third of the responses were basically “FUCK YOU, FERRETT, MY FAVORITE PODCAST IS HALF AN HOUR AND I KNOW IT BUT I’M GOING TO RECOMMEND IT DESPITE IT COMPLETELY NOT MATCHING YOUR CRITERIA.  ALSO, NIGHTVALE.”
But as it turns out, I like short podcasts.  The longer ones tend to ramble on forever, and I’d rather have people thinking carefully about what they have to say for fifteen minutes rather than hearing ninety minutes of guys saying anything that comes to mind.  The two-hour ones have been like listening Saturday Night Live renditions of NPR, where erring and umming people never have to cut away to commercials.
What Have I Enjoyed Thus Far?
Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff.  Yes, I know, I said I like short podcasts, but Ken and Robin are very good about giving everything in short chunks, switching discussions just as they threaten to become redundant… and of the three episodes I’ve listened to, only one segment (“What would have happened if Lovecraft had lived?”) utterly failed to connect.  They talk about GMing techniques and history in interesting ways, and they’re both pretty good conversationalists, so I’m happy to listen.
Writing Excuses.  The thing about this podcast is that it’s utterly noninformative to me.  The podcast is directed at an audience that’s usually discovering their style, and so I don’t think I’ve heard the gang say one thing yet that I haven’t gone, “Oh, yeah, I knew that.”  But a) it’s nice to have one’s biases concerned, and b) Mary, Howard, Dan, and Brandon are all so entertaining that I could listen to them debate about the Dewey Decimal system.  Plus, it’s short.  And they recommend some interesting books.
The Dissolve.  The Dissolve has taken the place of Roger Ebert in my “movie reviewers I trust” pantheon, and listening to them discuss movies is entertaining – especially since Tasha Robinson and Scott Tobias disagree eruditely and entertainingly.
A Prairie Home Companion.  Garrison Keillor used to be good, I swear.  These rambling tales he tells these days are mere shadows of the great days when he used to structure stories as fine as The Pontoon Boat.  But his voice is oddly soothing, and his voice has that fine radio erraticness of Paul Harvey – an instrument well-polished over the years, eclectic and unique and filled with strange pauses designed to draw you in and/or irritate you.  So listening to him is wonderful.
Numenera: The Signal.  I’m in the air on this one, because I love the trope – a Jack Who Tells Tales broadcasts dire warnings of the bizarre things in Numenera.  But the delivery sounds almost too polished for me, like a news announcer, and the weirdness is often not weird enough.  But it’s a delightful quick-blast, perfect for filling the bits between other longer podcasts.
Podcasts I Am Lukewarm About:
Podcastle.  This is part of that whole “long commitment” thing, wherein I usually love the tales but it’s hard to listen to them in twenty-minute dog-walking/cardio workout chunks.  And since these are stories, splitting them up into arbitrary segments is usually yucky.  One suspects I’ll have a long drive some day, and then I will absolutely adore this.
Welcome to Nightvale.  I’ll listen to more of it, I’m sure, but the first two episodes seemed weird for the sake of weird – that William Burroughs trick where I liked Naked Lunch but could turn to any page and get mostly the same experience.  I’m told some storylines develop, and this is very well done, but I’m not pulled to it yet.
Podcasts On My List That I Have Yet To Listen To:
99% Invisible, The Nerdist, The Dinner Party, SF Signal
Podcasts I Should Try:
Yes, you should recommend podcasts you think I’ve overlooked – not that I can stop you anyway.  (INSERT SMILEYFACE.)  But in general, I like weirdly close-focus topical things that are short; the “here’s an overview of everything ever” just bores the crap out of me.  I’d love to have a short Magic podcast that’s not Mark Rosewater (who I read the transcripts of instead), but they all seem to ramble on and on.
(And a special thanks to Vengeful Cynic, Ravenofdreams, and Peter C. Hayward for recommending Downcast, which has been an invaluable app purchase for this whole podcasting thing.  My timing on podcasting couldn’t be better, since the gym I’m in for my cardiac rehab has zero internet.)
 

Why Monsters University Is Better Than Monsters, Inc.

This is a truly stupid headline, as there’s no objective criteria to determine what makes a movie “better.”  But I like Monsters University better than Monsters, Inc. by a long shot, mainly because the lessons in Monsters University aren’t ones we traditionally see in kids’ films.
The thing is, Monsters Inc. is going to resonate more with a lot of people, because at its core Monsters Inc. is about what it means to be a parent – and the heartbreaking responsibilities (and rewards!) you take on when you decide to do the right thing for a child.  If you’ve got a kid, that’s guaranteed to tug on the old heartstrings.  But as an artist, I loved Monsters University because it’s about failure.  And hard truths.  And unhappy endings that become happy.
Which is to say:
1)  I love that Mike doesn’t get what he wants.  Too many kids’ movies tell you to “follow your dreams!” as though dreams are all attainable through hard work and stick-to-it-iveness.  But the ugly truth is that some people just aren’t right for what they wanna be.  Mike?  Isn’t particularly scary, and never will be.  Mike works harder than anybody, but sometimes sheer labor isn’t enough to get past a lack of inner talent.
Does that mean that Mike’s useless?  No.  All the skills he learned along the way get repurposed, repackaged, and ultimately rewarded.  And that’s a valuable lesson for kids; you can, and should, strive to be the best – but you might not make it.  That’s not a reason to give up; it’s a reason to fight harder.  The journey will teach you things.
Get in there, ya little green guy.
2)  I love that it’s a blue-collar film.  At the end – SPOILER ALERT – they don’t actually make it.  So how do they get onto the scare floor by the beginning of the next film?
They work from the ground up.
Humble beginnings, man.  They’re jazzed, they’re motivated, and they’re best friends, and they start from the mail room and refuse to stop.  This movie is not the end of their journey, but the beginning of when they really started.  It’s a subtle message for kids, but I really love the concept that they spent this whole movie learning how to work – and after that enlightenment comes a crapload of sweat and toil and promise before you get to your goal.
If Mike and Sully put in their 10,000 hours, Monsters University is, like, the first 250.  And I adore that the message is, “Work harder.  This isn’t magic, kids.”

"Beauty And The Beast" Envisioned As A Roleplaying Module

As many of you know, I’m writing an RPG module for the first time, and I’m finding the process a fascinating challenge.  I’ve written nonfiction books, and a whole lot of fiction, and a roleplaying module is a weird blend of the two.  Because you have a backstory you’re trying to tell – and ideally, a backstory that guides the PCs to some form of action – but you have to decide where to drop that information so that the PCs will stumble upon it.
As an example, let’s talk about the greatest Disney RPG module ever created: Beauty and the Beast.
You may think of Beauty and the Beast as a movie, but it’s actually a perfect setting for a roleplaying module – in fact, at the end, several low-level adventurers attempt to explore the castle, much to their chagrin, resulting in a Total Party Kill.  (This is when the torch-wielding villagers break into the castle at Gaston’s urging, only to get trounced by sneak attacks from animated furniture.)  You have a grand castle with explicit areas – the library! the ballroom! the woods filled with wolves! – and weird creatures like talking clocks and sentient cabinets, and a fascinating backstory of a Beast who can be turned human.  All of that’s right out of D&D, man.  Doesn’t take much to tweak it that instead of True Love to free the Beast, you must instead shatter the glass rose to free him, and then your players are hip-deep in fighting feral chiffarobes as they struggle to get to the Beast’s chamber.
The question is, how do you write up that module?
The backstory is fascinating – a Beast and his castle, cursed by a wandering witch, needing to be set free.  And on the one hand, you could place a pinata NPC at the beginning – say Lumiere – having someone meet them at the gates of the castle to say, “Hello, bold adventurers!  We have been cursed, and here is how you free us!  Fight your way in!”  And then the players have a very clear line of action to have, struggling to the chamber.  Victory is clear and compelling!
But then – and this will irritate some parties – the players have no agency, and encounter no mystery.  They have been told what to do, and even if they are successful, they have merely enacted someone else’s plan.  You can make it super-exciting on a micro-level – fear the sentient knives in the kitchen, my friends! – but on a large scale, this is a simple story that may bore groups who don’t feel like cookie-cutter adventures.
On the other hand, you can space out the information.  They enter the castle – and wonder why the cabinets move, why the rug coils up like a snake, what that shadowy snarl from some fearsome Beast is and when it will attack them.  Clearly, something has gone dreadfully wrong, and as the designer it’s your job to scatter the elements of the story through the castle in a Bioshock-style format – a dusty diary reveals the story of the witch, some other clue reveals a potential way to break the spell, a frightened Belle running from the Beast tells of the Beast’s cruel streak, and bold Cogsworth explains why the Beast is worth saving.
This story is more compelling to some, who’ll enjoy finding the mystery within.  But it also doesn’t give the players a clear line of action, which will frustrate many players – “Why are we roaming in this crazy castle?” – and it may make them feel dumb if they can’t piece together the information you give them into something to do.  The failure state of this more ambitious roleplaying module is that players wander around not sure what to do, shrugging as they move on to the next room instead of boldly pursuing it.  The PCs may even botch the rescue entirely.
So maybe you go with some kind of hybrid method, revealing the action up-front to lure them in, but burying surprise “plot twists” in the castle – but as a game designer, that’s an additional layer of complexity to add.  Because you can’t control the players truly, you can just sort of funnel them towards what you think would interest them, and writing this as if the PCs will follow a predetermined course will lead to a dissatisfying adventure.
The real answer is that there’s no wrong way to write this adventure – but there’s also no perfect way to write it, either, even though this tale’s as old as time.  The elements remain the same no matter what approach you take: the castle with its rooms to explore, the Beast that must be freed or damned, the witch who cast a spell.  But those elements, clear as they are, do not make a game.  You, as the designer, have to figure out how to rearrange and present those details for maximum effect, and to do that you have to decide what that effect should be.
Which is what writing stories is all about, actually.

Literally My Last Blog Entry On The Word "Literally"

Yesterday, I Tweeted this:

The OED says you may use “literally” to mean “metaphorically.” I will literally think less of you if you do. http://t.co/wPVJd9ewP5
— Fear It Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) October 30, 2013

Which caused many to label me a “prescriptivist,” informing me that I can be a fussy stick-in-the-mud while they will rejoice in the way language evolves.
One wonders how they’ll respond when, via the exact same mechanisms, the OED defines “gay” as “stupid” and “embarrassing.”
The truth is, I’m not a member of your language gang wars.  On the whole, I think it’s fascinating and wonderful how language is a living entity, not really controlled by any single person, this sort of floating, mutating mass of information hovering over all of us.  The words “twerking” and “photobomb,” yes, should appear in dictionaries.  Nor am I the sort of person who grits his teeth when someone says “should of,” as though it’s blatantly incorrect it’s one of those language shifts that simply happens.  I think it makes you look dim at this point in time, and encourage you heartily to use language that makes you look smarter, but I’d wager in a century or two it’ll be a widely-accepted thing.
If you truly believe that language should never evolve, then why aren’t you speaking Chaucerian English?  No.  What you’re doing, as Stephen Fry correctly pointed out, is taking the language you were made comfortable by and attempting to freeze it in time.  And as I correctly pointed out in one of my first-ever entries, The Stupid Always Win; you literally cannot fight the evolution if enough people start using it their way.  Language is determined by mass usage, not some book or college course, and if you don’t find that fascinating then I don’t know what you do find fascinating.
However.
Just because language does evolve doesn’t always mean it’s correct to evolve.
As I said in my essay previously, “This is, incidentally, why the PC obsession with language is a complete balls-up. It doesn’t matter whether you call someone a ‘Negro’ or an ‘African-American’ or a ‘people of color’ – if enough redneck hicks stand on the corner sneering, “Hey! Person’a Coler! Go backter Africa where y’came from!” the term will become a slur no matter how well-intentioned it is. Many of the terms we use to insult women today – like ‘whore,’ for example – started out as referring to high-bred and respectable ladies, and slid. Language works back-to-front, not front-to-back.”
(I was wrong about “whore,” incidentally.  It started out as “lover.”  Still, my point remains.)
And in the case of “literally,” it is literally the only convenient word to mean “this factually happened.”  Yes, even such greats as Mark Twain misused it on occasion.  Yes, it’s been sliding since the very day it was introduced.  Yet the reason I object to the term being used is not because I am a language snob, but because I am a language snob.  I object not because I don’t believe language should change, but because without literally we’re bereft of a common word that does the same job, and are instead reduced to saying stupid things like, “No, I mean literally literally.”
Getting rid of literally in the exclusive sense of “literal” is like getting rid of peanut butter.  Oh, maybe you can find almond butter somewhere on in the dusty back shelves of your grocery store, but it’s inconvenient to find and it doesn’t taste quite the same.
As such, I reject the paradigm that loving language means loving all of language’s shifts.  I do not have to rubber-stamp every evolution.  Some of those changes make for more awkward vagueness, and to those changes, I am opposed.  Some of them, like the usage of “gay” to mean “dumb,” draw ugly parallels, and to them I am opposed.
Others have also argued that merely being defined in the OED doesn’t mean anything.  I argue it does.  If I tell you, “I am afraid of the dog,” and by “dog” I mean “nuclear holocaust,” then when people misunderstand me you’ll tell me that really, it’s my fault.  And it is.  But if I were to point you to a dictionary and show you that indeed, a common alternate meaning of “dog” was “nuclear holocaust,” you’d feel as though you were at fault for being sufficiently uneducated.  (You might also think me pretentious for using such arcane terminology, and you might be correct.  But you wouldn’t call me wrong.)
Being used commonly enough to make it into the OED is, in fact, a stamp of legitimacy.  I’m not saying that the OED should not so stamp it; the OED’s job is to describe the language, not define it.  But it’s like watching George W. Bush elected twice; I can agree that this should happen at the same time I lament it.
And lastly, some were distressed by the fact that I will think less of you if you use it in this new and more-authorized fashion.  They didn’t like the judgment.  I’ll remind them that they’re free to judge me in turn for being snobby or callous or thoughtless; in fact, every time I post, I am in fact encouraging you to pass judgment on me one way or another.  That’s pretty much what public writing is.  If I post a poorly-thought-out entry and you think, “Gee, he really should have thought twice before posting such misogynistic drivel,” I’d argue you should think less of me for presenting myself poorly.  Likewise, I’ll think a little less of you should you use the language in a way I think isn’t thoughtful.
If this distresses you, I am a pudgy balding depressive neurotic man with attention issues, and I will remind you that my opinion is eminently dismissable.  I’ll also remind you that a few hours with a Google search could probably find numerous examples where I myself have used the term “literally” in a way I find abhorrent.
Yes.  I do think less of myself for lapsing on those occasions.   Yet somehow I live.  “Thinking less” is not “dismissing entirely,” and we can remain friends.  You’ll just bug me whenever you do that.  But that is literally what friends do.

Moral Imperatives

Yesterday, a spirited conversation broke out in my comments about whether it’s right for a politician to act against the moral will of his constituents.  If the people want something they consider moral, and the politician doesn’t vote for that, shouldn’t the politician step down?
My take remains the same: I elect a guy because I want him to be smarter than I am.  And after that, I gotta trust that he’s balancing morality against pragmatism.
My personal lesson on that was the first Iraq war, way back in 1991.
Now, I was not for either Iraq war – but once we invaded and trounced Saddam Hussein’s army in an almost embarrassing spectacle, there were a lot of people saying, “Roll into the capital!  Topple Saddam!  Finish the job!”  And Bush – the first and wiser Bush – rolled up to the gates, and then withdrew, leaving Saddam Hussein in power.
There were a lot of people upset about this.  I mean, shit, we had a dictator who’d gassed his own goddamned people!  How could we just walk away, leaving a bloodthirsty maniac in charge?  We’re literally on his doorstep!  And a lot of people were pissed off, because morally, the choice was clear: what kind of a man would choose to keep a tyrant propped on the throne?
As we all know, Bush the first was a one-term President.  A lot of that was his raising taxes, but some significant portion was his refusal to do the satisfying thing, and the moral thing, by refusing to pull the trigger on Iraq’s evil bits when he had the shot.
As we all also know, thanks to his dumber son, things weren’t nearly that simple.  Yes, we could – and did! – remove a tyrant.  But removing that cork meant all the sectarian tensions in the area were suddenly unleashed, creating a wave of bloody infighting that killed roughly 125,000 civilians.  Admittedly, we did a really bad job of actually preparing for that tension, but I think even if we’d planned and executed the transition well, we’d still have had tens of thousands of people dead.  And, of course, Iraq’s only now starting to recover.  And, of course, other dictators have had more breathing room because America has had to pour a lot of resources into Iraq and really can’t threaten war the way we used to.
Which is not to say there’s not a case to be made for toppling Saddam, who killed hundreds of thousands of people as well.  But too many people at the time saw getting rid of Saddam as “Oh my God, it’s so simple, why wouldn’t you?” They (and I!) saw it as a stupidly easy snap-call, like just calling in the exterminator, and watching Bush as he made the call to just pull up stakes and leave was highly frustrating.  But Bush, who paid attention to world politics in a way he rarely gets credit for, realized what a snakepit it would be trying to set up our own government there, and decided that it would kill a lot of people and not be particularly effective.
History seems to indicate that he had a point.
And my point is that a lot of voters – including you – get pissed because things seem so simple that they become black and white: “This is clearly the only responsible thing to do, and my God, how dare the guy I elected contradict my desires?  This isn’t just politics, it’s a clear moral imperative!”  And I believe, as with most things, that the world is full of ugly grays, our power is more limited than we’d ever want to believe, and more often than not one guy’s moral imperative is a stupid oversimplification that’s going to get us all into trouble.  The Tea Party is a very simple party with very simple needs, and things are very clear to them.  And actually, I find that’s what makes them as dangerous as they are: that inflexible set of demands backed by a moral outrage.
Me?  I’ll go to Obama again.  I wanted single-payer.  I was outraged when, because the benefits of single-payer were so ridiculously clear to me, that Obama didn’t fight for it.  And his refusal to go to the mat for it felt, at the time, very much like a betrayal of the principles that I elected him for.  But Obama had access to all sorts of polls I never saw, and knew what sorts of opposition he’d face in Congress and from the insurance companies and from the medical companies, and I’m willing to admit that while I think pushing for a single-payer system was the clear and righteous thing to do, the vastly-flawed Obamacare may have been the only thing that he could have actually gotten through as legislation.
In other words, Obama may have decided that my moral imperative was actually not doable, and decided to enact the best available solution, even if that solution is in many ways crappy and unsatisfying and flawed.  Kind of like walking away from Saddam.  And so I am suspicious when people tell me that the job of their elected officials should be a rubber stamp, because frankly I don’t think “reading whatever articles that seem interesting on Twitter” qualifies me to make decisions to run my home town, let alone the entire country.
I think elected officials, if they’re doing their job right, will be liars.  Because they’ll promise one thing from the campaign trail, and then discover new and ugly and very unsatisfying facts.  And all you can do is hope that your guy was the guy he said he was, and vote him out if you really don’t like him.
Which means that, like Bush, quite often measured wisdom and forethought will mean getting booted out.  Which is something to ponder.

When Are You Worse Than A Bigot?

Jim Wheeler, Nevada lawmaker, said that he’d vote for slavery if his constituents wanted it.
But, he adds, “There is absolutely no room in my life for any bigotry.”  He’s not a bigot.  He just believes very strongly that he has to do the will of the people, and if those people want slavery, well, he’d hold his nose and vote for slavery.
So no, Jim.  You’re not a bigot.  You’re worse.  You’re a spineless man who knows better, and yet is so desperate to retain power that you’ll actively do the wrong thing rather than resign.  Or, you know, vote against it.  You’re the kind of scummy, thin-water politician who lets all kinds of dumb-ass horrors happen because, “Hey, the people want it!”  As if a mere collection of votes created justice.
I know we venerate “the people” in America.  And Democracy is a fine thing.  But too often, the majority wants stupid and selfish things, and it’s the job of politicians to get in their goddamned way.  This is why politicians are often not popular; their electorate wants magic, simple solutions, and the real answers are generally dissatisfying compromises and long-term struggles against herculean opposition.  So good politicians, even effective ones, are often hated.
(I want single-payer health care. Yet as I’ve seen the crazy opposition to the Republican-created, very insurance-company-friendly Obamacare, I start to think Obama knew exactly how unlikely it was he could have gotten us to a British system.  So I can hate on Obama, but there’s a damn good chance he was more in touch with reality than I was.)
If you’re nothing but a rubber stamp for your electorate, then no.  You’re not a bigot.  You’re just a channel to enact bigotry, creating more legalized hatred and despair than any one individual bigot, and you actually know better.
Not something to be proud of, Jim.  Not something to be proud of at all.