Random Thoughts On Going Viral: Some Follow-Up Thoughts On "Dear Daughter"
So my essay “Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have (Fucking) Awesome Sex” was reposted at The Good Men Project, and now it’s all over the net. Over 31,000 people have “liked” it on Facebook, and I’ve gotten requests for interviews. (Sadly, all on a weekend I’m presenting at the Geeky Kink Event, so I’m booked.) And with this comes a lot of weird emotions:
1) I’ve had a lot of people claiming I’m either a good father or a bad father, which makes me uncomfortable. That turns the essay into a moratorium on whether my daughters are appropriately well-raised for society, and I don’t particularly feel like dragging them out into this spotlight. I don’t often discuss Erin or Amy on this blog because I arrived in their lives with a (much smaller) audience, and early on I decided that they should choose their own level of involvement. They, quite wisely, chose not to play. And so inadvertently having this essay blow up as a spotlight is a little awkward, since it does kind of invite the question, “So are his daughters happy?”
They are. But how much of that is due to me is questionable. I think if we’re honest as parents, we acknowledge we are but one oar in turbulent waters; my kids arrived pre-baked with their own genetic inclinations towards specific mischiefs, and all their relatives weighed in (often against me, sometimes rightfully so), and then when they got to be adolescents then the approval of other children started to matter a lot. You can be a very good parent, I think, and have a child who is quote-unquote “bad” (which I define as “unhappy” or “in a life’s situation that makes them unhappy”), and you can be a terrible parent and luck out.
Being a parent is a lot like being the President: there’s a lot more luck involved in good results than anyone wants to admit.
2) I had one guy telling the world, “HE DOESN’T EVEN HAVE DAUGHTERS! CHECK HIS BIOS!” which struck me as supremely weird. One of my proudest moments was when I was on a panel with John Scalzi, discussing blogging, and he looked at me and said, “…I didn’t know you had daughters.”
I was proud because I have a reputation for being an oversharer, but my kids? Have their own lives. I’ve kept them shielded from that aspect of my D-list celebrity fame, and that feels good. So to have a guy using that strength as proof I’m making all of this up? A little strange.
(I tend to treat idiots on the Internet as though they’re stray dogs, confused and baffled by the world. I’m not mad, just trying to figure out how any sane person would come to this conclusion.)
3) I’m not a great father. I have some strengths, and open communication about sex and drugs is one of them, but I’m also introverted, short-tempered, and hate phone calls like they were acid poured on my genitals. I’m glad what I said resonated, very glad, but there’s a lot of dads who are way better than I’ve ever been. One solid opinion does not greatness make.
4) Some of the comments involved people saying, “Oh, man, so you wouldn’t mind if I had sex with your daughter? Mind giving me her number?” Which completely misses the point. Would I give you her number? No, because – as mentioned – I don’t own her. If she wants to give you her number, then she can. Because I don’t think it’s bad that they have sex with people.
I do think it’s bad if they have sex with idiots, which is why I try to encourage them otherwise. But I’m also not sold on my own infallibility. Maybe you’re not as much of an asshole as I think you are. I’ll suggest, but ultimately she has to come to her own conclusions.
But, you know, I’m pretty sure she’ll spot you as an idiot off the bat. And if I have taught them one lesson, it is in fact not to fuck the terminally stupid.
5) I’m glad I’ve had enough pieces hit it big to handle the criticism, praise, and misreadings that come with any article that blows up. (Though the blowback on this one is nastier than almost anything I’ve weathered before now.) The thing people never get about these sorts of essays is that, despite all I’ve written before, the article is only tangentially about you. People share things this widely because they wish they’d said it themselves, and as an author, I just feel grateful that I’ve articulated this churning wellspring enough that it resonated.
Basically, if you shared it, thanks. I’m glad it helped. I hope it convinces someone. That’s all the good I can do.
Numenera: The Review
Gamers will do what you reward them for doing. They can come to hate you for that.
That’s one of the tenets of designer Mark Rosewater. He says that gamers will do whatever you encourage them to do via a game’s rules, even if what you’re asking them to do is not fun. Do your rules reward players who keep track of money down to the last copper piece, providing extra XP for people who treat the game like it was Accountants and Assets instead of Dungeons and Dragons? Well, they’ll do it, even if there’s no one stopping them from discarding that rule… and they’ll come to believe your game is a tedious slog. So, Rosewater says, you have to be very careful about what sorts of play your rules incentivize.
D&D, unfortunately, encourages the wrong things.
D&D has been trying to accentuate the roleplaying aspect for years, but in the end, the main function for getting XP is killing monsters and stealing treasure… so that’s all most players do. The ill-advised D&D Fourth Edition changed the game into the all-combat system, basically assuming the roleplaying would arise organically and turning the game into a miniatures fighting game – which immediately looked inferior to the computer-handled combat of World of Warcraft, and D&D’s been struggling to regain its footing.
Numenera, Monte Cook’s latest RPG, attempts to reward different behaviors.
Numenera feels like an experienced DM stripping D&D down to its core and trying to refocus it on storytelling. The mechanics are clean, relatively simple, and emphasize story complications. You no longer get XP for killing monsters, you get them for story complications.
Which is to say that the GM says, “Okay, you’re climbing that ledge into the Baron’s lair, and it’s going too easily. I’ll throw in a GM Intrusion; you grab a loose rock, which tumbles out of your hands, hits your head, and you begin to fall.” The player can choose to refuse the GM intrusion, in which case he has to pay 1 XP for a smooth climb, or he gains 2 XP as a reward for story complication – and has to give one of those XP away to a player immediately.
XP, in turn, are a more dynamic resource than most games. You can save XP to level up, but you can also burn a point of XP to reroll a die, have another player reroll their die, make a task easier, and so forth. Monte estimates about half a player’s XP will be spent making the game easier, which in turn gives the players a little more control than the usual frustrating “I’ve rolled four critical misses in a row!” dependence on dice.
This clever little twist would be notable in roleplaying alone, as it’s got the right incentives; you don’t get XP for killing monsters, but rather for allowing more interesting things to happen in the game. You can have a very boring game, if you want, but then you’ll get no experience. And so the DM can, as the guidebook notes, subtly railroad you; if you want the players to be captured, rather than fudging die rolls, you instead keep intruding until the odds are stacked against them, which gives them more of a reward and makes it feel a little more natural.
The rest of the game feels surprisingly refreshing, designed to deal with common problems in roleplaying. Characters love spending hours tweaking their characters, but that means that DMs often spend tedious hours creating NPCs in the same system. Solution? NPCs are built using an entirely different and quicker system, so you can generate a monster in twenty seconds. GMs often have problems setting the difficulties of various tasks thanks to lots of tables and modifiers. Solution? Monte creates an absolute table of difficulties from 0 (anyone can do it without effort) to 10 (the maximum doable by humans, the stuff of legends), and sets it up so that it’s trivial for a GM to figure out how hard this door is to unlock.
The end result is clean, stripped, efficient. It feels like the game is working for you; in D&D, there were so many rules it felt like you often had to battle the system in order to remember how to do something, but Numenera is working in your direction. There’s even a large section where Monte talks to you, the GM, directly about the intent behind these rules, with lots of admirably concrete and crunchy examples about how you’d use them in real life.
The setting, alas, is a touch less successful. Numenera takes place in a far-future Earth, with people living in the detritus of long-dead civilizations, emphasizing mysterious futuretech. That is very evocative, and works wonderfully. Less so are the kingdoms and geography of the world, which aren’t nearly as memorable as the setting; you have all sorts of semi-generic places like The Seafaring Trader City and The Kingdom Riven By Civil War, which feel just a tad underimaginized for such a rich and crazy world. Admittedly, I’m spoiled by Monte’s rich imagination at work in Planescape, where each plane was a reflection of one of the classic alignments, but it’s disappointing to have such a bizarre and rifty world with a layer of old medieval history plopped on top.
(The sample adventures, however, are richly imagined – and there are four of them, which I think do a better job at bringing out the setting than the tour through the lands. This is a significant saving grace, and there’s even an added adventure for Kickstarter backers.)
Also slightly disappointing: cyphers, which are one-shot, mysterious, salvaged items characters carry to have very potent powers they can only use once. This is a conscious design choice, and a very good one, to give players a constant flow of exciting, above-their-paygrade powers to dazzle with. Yeah, it gets weary when a character teleports out of every danger, but the cyphers are sketchily working things forced to do duties they were never designed to, so having an excuse to have a character teleport once into the Duke’s bedroom – when, say, he began to fall from a ledge – leads to the stuff of legends. Which is exciting! It’s great to have a constant stream of new powers to toy with!
Alas, given how often you’re supposed to give cyphers out – supposedly characters should burn through 1d6 of the devices per session, and have them replenished – there’s just not enough variety for my tastes. There are a hundred sample cyphers, which seems like a lot, but I know from long experience on the Wand of Wonder table will grow stale quickly. So I was hoping for a thousand of them to start with. One suspects other numenera tables will be brought out stat, but for such a critical aspect of the game – which was almost named after the cyphers – I would have liked more fleshing.
Still, this looks to be one of the best new games in a long time, and it accomplished what a good game should do: it has me ravenous to play it. The next step is clearing my schedule to see when I can do it, and assembling enough players to bring it on, and personally? I can’t wait to start bringing people through the Ninth World. If you’re interested, and you should be, I’d definitely pick up a copy now. Because though I have yet to run a session, it looks like it rewards all the right things for both GMs and players, and that will allow wonderful games to emerge organically.
This Is Why We Fight
Snubaing underwater was the closest I have ever been to flying. And I have always dreamed of flying.
I had snubaed only once, in the Caribbean, and it remains one of the highlights of my life; soaring underwater, tethered to a raft with an oxygen tank, sort of a SCUBA for dummies. But I circled a shipwreck, intoxicated with the power of moving in three dimensions, pretending I was Superman as I shot upwards, downwards, freed from gravity. It remains one of the highlights not just of the trip, but of my life. Sometimes I dream about it.
Alas, there aren’t that many scuba opportunities in Cleveland. And Gini, who panicks at the scuba mask, can’t do it, so I’d have to go alone. So I left that dream behind.
They didn’t have snuba in Hawaii, on my trip; it was the first thing I checked. So I settled for snorkeling as a sort of snuba-methadone. And you know, it’s really a #firstworldproblem to go out to the blue waters of Hawaii and look at a reef and bitch, “Well, I can’t go down,” so I settled in for a fine afternoon.
Yet on the boat out, the owners revealed a special treat: they had just gotten a snuba package. You could snuba, if you wanted, for an additional fee of –
I was down at the sign-up desk before they finished the announcement, filling out the form. I was elated. Here was a dream I’d let go dormant, yes, but it wasn’t dead – it was roaring awake now, thrumming a happy beat in my head, SNUBA SNUBA SNUBA. I’d float weightless again, lost in superhero dreams, in one of the most beautiful reefs of the world, and oh my God my hands trembled. This was happening. To burn off energy I texted all my friends I could remember, posted a Twitter status, re-read the snuba instructions, vibrating with anticipation.
Snuba? Best thing in the world.
And so when the snuba instructor came up to me and said, “You ready, buddy?” and clapped me on the shoulder, I gave him a hearty “And how!” and he laughed at my excitement until he looked down at the consent form.
Suddenly, his whole attitude changed. He was a hearty, healthy, Hawaiian surfer, with a six-pack and a tan, and he took an unconscious step away from me.
“You… had a heart attack?” he asked, cringing. “When?”
“Eight months ago,” I said. I’d put it on the form. And when he touched me on the shoulder, this time it was gingerly, as though I might break. As though my frailty was catching.
“Look,” he said, slowly, overly kindly, the firm concern you’d show to someone who wasn’t quite in control of their mental senses. “You can’t go down, after a heart attack. It’s not safe. I could call back to the home office, and they’d tell you this isn’t safe, either. I’m sorry.”
And… I broke.
What I should have said was, “Look, it was a small infarction, so much so that it was fourteen hours in the hospital before they were certain it was an attack. And yes, they cracked open my chest, and recovery was painful, but now I eat better than I did before, and I do more exercise, and I’m actually in better shape now than I would have been eight months back. I am perfectly fit for that water, probably in a way that some of the other undiagnosed people around me in this class are not, so let me in.”
But there is something about the way he treated me. I was not a healthy person to him. I was frail, perhaps too stupid to know what I was truly up to, and when he looked at me he was sad and a little repulsed that I might think I was worthy of this. He was not mean in any way, but clearly I wasn’t in his league. Or the league of the other people without thick keloid scars on their chests. I was… inferior. Unfit. To be protected from myself.
It was little embarrassing I was there, to be frank. In his eyes.
And so I slunk away, a hole kicked in my chest. I barely avoided crying, but that’s pretty much only because it would have confirmed his suspicions. I slunk upstairs, and posted to Twitter that there would be no Snuba, and bathed in the feeling of second-class citizen.
Look. It’s not that I don’t fight for my own rights. Fully two-thirds of my ex-girlfriends will tell you we broke up because I would not stop asking for what I wanted. I’m not weak-willed. But when you’re flying so high, so joyous, and some asshole tugs you back down to earth by telling you that you’re not really worthy of that joy, it breaks something inside of you.
And for the rest of the day, I felt my scar ache.
For the rest of the day, I covered up my chest so no one would notice. Convinced everyone was noticing.
For the rest of the day, I felt shamed.
And I thought: this is why I fight for equality.
Because look, as a healthy middle-classed white cissexual guy, I’m the standard against which all others are discriminated against. I happen to have a condition which, on this one occasion, completely ruined my fun.
But there are happy black people yanked down to earth after someone shouted the N-word.
There are happy gay couples yanked back down to earth after someone called them faggots.
There are happy people in wheelchairs yanked back down to earth after someone treats them like they’re china dolls.
There are happy women engineers yanked back down to earth after someone mansplains their car to them.
That moment was awful for me, that time of othering, that malicious-free sense of how could you think you could really do this? – but though I’m tearing up writing this, it’s a solitary moment, and it’ll pass. Yet I take this moment as a time to remember that there are a lot of discriminated people out there who deal with this not once every couple of years, but once a month, once a week, once a day – that kick to the chest that says, you don’t really deserve to be here.
Fuck the people who put them there.
Fuck them hard.
And that’s why I post on discriminations of all kinds, because it doesn’t matter how strong and confident you are, one sucker punch will take the wind from you. It erodes you. It’s harder to remember that you’re a human being worthy of love when that shit barrages you. And anyone throwing that punch is, whether they mean to or not, a jerk who’s doing damage.
I don’t think discrimination is as clear as black water fountains vs. white water fountains. I think a lot of discrimination is subtly encoded, that switch from the hearty thump to the ginger squeeze on the shoulder, that switch flipped from Of course you can to you need some help. And we’re human. We take our cues from other people. It’s fucking hard, fighting against a world where you think you’re great and everyone else thinks you’re not quite up to snuff. If you’ve got a society sending out all of these secret and subtle signals, signals that someone who’s not you can completely fucking overlook because they’re not broadcast at him, then you’re struggling up a mountain with a heavy load.
It’s not a laudable trait, really. I know how much that day hurt me, still does. And I think that nobody deserves to go through that, and sadly it doesn’t take too much effort to look around and see that some people do go through that on a regular basis.
That shouldn’t happen. People shouldn’t hurt. And they shouldn’t take the hurt they do have and ignore it; I think that it’s a moral necessity, when injured, to ask, Who else is hurt by this, and are they hurt more often than I am?
That’s why we should all do what we can to stop it. And that is all.
Dear Daughter: I Hope You Have Some Fucking Awesome Sex.
There’s a piece of twaddle going around FetLife called 10 Rules For Dating My Daughter, which is packed with “funny” threats like this:
“Rule Four: I’m sure you’ve been told that in today’s world, sex without utilising some kind of ‘barrier method’ can kill you. Let me elaborate: when it comes to sex, I am the barrier, and I will kill you.”
All of which boil down to the tedious, “Boys are threatening louts, sex is awful when other people do it, and my daughter is a plastic doll whose destiny I control.”
Look, I love sex. It’s fun. And because I love my daughter, I want her to have all of the same delights in life that I do, and hopefully more. I don’t want to hear about the fine details because, heck, I don’t want those visuals any more than my daughter wants mine. But in the abstract, darling, go out and play.
Because consensual sex isn’t something that men take from you; it’s something you give. It doesn’t lessen you to give someone else pleasure. It doesn’t degrade you to have some of your own. And anyone who implies otherwise is a man who probably thinks very poorly of women underneath the surface.
Yes, all these boys and girls and genderqueers may break your heart, and that in turn will break mine. I’ve held you, sobbing, after your boyfriend cheated on you, and it tore me in two. But you know what would tear me in two even more? To see you in a glass cage, experiencing nothing but cold emptiness at your fingers, as Dear Old Dad ensured that you got to experience nothing until he decided what you should like.
You’re not me. Nor are you an extension of my will. And so you need to make your own damn mistakes, to learn how to pick yourself up when you fall, to learn where the bandages are and to bind up your own cuts. I’ll help. I’ll be your consigliere when I can, the advisor, the person you come to when all seems lost. But I think there’s value in getting lost. I think there’s a strength that only comes from fumbling your own way out of the darkness.
You’re your own person, and some of the things you’re going to love will strike me as insane, ugly, or unenjoyable. This is how large and wonderful the world is! Imagine if everyone loved the same thing; we’d all be battling for the same ten people. The miracle is how easily someone’s cast-offs become someone else’s beloved treasure. And I would be a sad, sad little man if I manipulated you into becoming a cookie-cutter clone of my desires. Love the music I hate, watch the movies I loathe, become a strong woman who knows where her bliss is and knows just what to do to get it.
Now, you’re going to get bruised by life, and sometimes bruised consensually. But I won’t tell you sex is bad, or that you’re bad for wanting it, or that other people are bad from wanting it from you if you’re willing to give it. I refuse to perpetuate, even through the plausible deniability of humor, the idea that the people my daughter is attracted to are my enemy.
I’m not the guard who locks you in the tower. Ideally, I am my daughter’s safe space, a garden to return to when the world has proved a little too cruel, a place where she can recuperate and reflect upon past mistakes and know that here, there is someone who loves her wholeheartedly and will hug her until the tears dry.
That’s what I want for you, sweetie. A bold life filled with big mistakes and bigger triumphs.
Now get out there and find all the things you fucking love, and vice versa.
Things I Like About My New Dog
- She doesn’t chew stuff in the house. As a first-time visitor to the home, she could be expected to gnaw on a few shoes or cords; doesn’t.
- She knows “no” very well, and has already learned not to get up on the furniture. Today, I threw her monkey over the couch, and she leapt up on the couch to get to it, got an “Oh crap!” look on her face, and jumped down.
- She is not fazed by loud noises, like thunderstorms or the icemaker or the blender.
- She is, however, baffled by the MPS (our home theater system) and was actively pushing at the speakers when there was a crying baby she was trying to help. Adorbs.
- She is housetrained, and hasn’t had a single accident yet.
- She’s social. She wants to be where we are, so follows us about, but also respects boundaries; she’ll poke her head into the bathroom, but won’t come in.
- She loves her squeaky monkey, and has just learned the trick of flinging it into the air so she can catch it herself.
- She’s surprisingly chill with other dogs, even if she inspires what I’m told is “Black Dog Syndrome”: other dogs react like she’s fucking Damien, which apparently is because they can’t read her body language. It’s a little weird seeing them loser their shit while Shasta just sort of cocks her head to go, “What’s your issue, dude?”
- She barks a little when someone is at the door, but a very short series – two or three, kind of like a doggy doorbell. Then she calms down, once she knows who it is.
- She likes her scritches. I’m still charmed when I’m mapping out solutions for a tough problem at SCG, and suddenly there’s this face popping up to want a pet. I can’t resist.
There are some issues, natch – mainly Shasta’s separation anxiety, as whenever anyone leaves the house she loses it, and whines and barks like we’ve all been chewed to bits in a human-mangling factory – but that’ll pass, as we’ve been instructed by previous dog owners to not make any deal of it, just come and go like everything’s all but normal, and eventually she’ll adjust.
Of course, literally as I typed that last sentence, she came into the living room with a mouthful of tasty paper towels she’d shredded, but… we got it out of her mouth quickly, and she gave it up without incident. So on the whole, I pronounce Shasta to be a Good Dog.