What's That? There's A New Interface? It's Terrible!
I can’t believe they changed the old, user-friendly version to this new crappy look. It’s ugly, it’s nonfunctional, and it’s sure to drive the old users away. How could they sift through all the available options and choose this awful look?
…what site am I talking about? All of them. Doesn’t matter. Every time Facebook twitches, every time Gmail has a new look, it sends a spill of vomitous hate out to my Twitter-feed. (God forbid Twitter actually changes its look.) People fricking hate site redesigns, program redesigns, you name it.
I ignore them, because I remember two things:
1) Back in the first days of Windows, when nobody was quite sure how to turn a complicated word processor into a GUI look and three titans battled for control of the market, they did a study. Which word processor was easiest for people to use? And so they did hundreds of tests putting the then-tiny Microsoft Word up against the juggernaut of Wordperfect for Windows, and Lotus’ well-reviewed-but-never-well-selling AmiPro.
They found that 90% – that’s 90%! – of the people agreed that one word processor was easiest to use. That word processor?
The one they were familiar with.
That’s right, the user interface didn’t matter – what mattered was that you’d already done the hard work of parsing the user interface. Once you knew how to save a document and how to print to an envelope, the program you used magically became “good” – even if you’d forgotten how ridiculous it was to learn in the beginning. What people hated, it seemed, was the effort of relearning things.
2) When I first redesigned StarCityGames.com (back when I still had significant input into the design process), I premiered a mostly red-and-yellow version of the site, to try to differentiate it from all the other blue-and-black Magic sites out there. I got a lot of hate mail from people telling me the new design was awful, why did I go with those colors, how dare you fuck it up? I saved them all in a folder.
Nine months later, I did another redesign, this time switching to the “classic” colors of green and yellow, since I though the red-and-yellow was a little eye-searing. I also got a tide of hate mail. But I compared. Of the people who complained violently, discussing how the old look was better, about 10% were the people who’d emailed to bitch how terrible the old new look was.
That’s when I decided that most people just hate change.
This isn’t to say there aren’t terrible user interfaces out there – Windows 8 is a major misfire to me, and Facebook’s thankfully-aborted two-column content made it impossible to know where a given news item might fall. But mostly, when I hear people whining that this new look is awful and unusable and clunky, I mentally substitute “I have to learn things again.” And realize that once they’ve learned it, 90% of those people will settle down and be content.
Until the next change, of course. Then they’ll hate it all over again.
I Have To Worldbuild The Past: On Birth Control
One of my favorite authors, Daniel Abraham, said this yesterday:
“I keep thinking that, since it happened before I was born, I’ve failed to grok how much reliable birth control changed things. Thousands of generations with one risk/reward set for sex, and two with the new rules. I expect the species to still be freaked out.”
Thing is, he’s right. I was thinking what the world must have been like in the days when women could just get pregnant for having sex, and there was no consistent control over it, and I found myself slipping into my “science fiction worldbuilder” mode: what would be the ramifications of that decision? How would that affect society? Because it was such an alien concept to me that I had to back into it.
Which was bizarre, because for me, sex has never been linked to procreation, except accidentally or when specifically desired. Don’t want a kid? You’ve got your IUD, your pill, your shot, and arguably condoms… the female body has ways of shutting that stuff down, and they’re all called science. Sex is for pleasure – and if you approach it carefully, usually without too much danger of pregnancy happening. I’m usually far more worried about my friends catching STDs than having unwanted children.
But yeah, when I go back a century or two, sex and procreation were pretty much inseparable, a sloppy entangled risk you could reduce only unreliably. Maybe you could turn that 1-in-20 shot of getting pregnant into 1-in-100 if you pulled out and were careful, but… it still happened. A lot.
And pregnancy was a sentence, in those days. Dying during childbirth was a serious possibility, so getting pregnant was a potential death sentence even if you felt comfortable giving away the child. And if you didn’t want to give birth? Abortion, back in the days before we understood sanitation and proper surgery, was equally dangerous, if not more so. You could take abortaficients, but those were like chemotherapy – a semi-controlled poison that may or may not work, and may actually kill you.
Sex was, in many very real ways, a direct link to death, and certainly to a different kind of life. Back in the days when people literally starved to death for lack of government assistance, an extra mouth to feed could be a strain you couldn’t afford. Especially if you were a single mother who would have to work, without the assistance of a full-time partner, without the concept of “days off” or “restricted workdays,” as even the comparatively genteel work of being a maid was literally a seventeen-hour day job, six days a week.
Which, as a guy who thinks of sex as more porn than babymaking, is deeply unsettling to contemplate. That concept that all of this hideous slut-shaming I fight against has a kernel of old truth buried inside it – sleeping around could literally kill you as a woman, and on some level the mothers who were telling women to not give it up were speaking from some aspect of knowledge that hey, if he knocks you up, maybe you bleed out from this unwanted child.
There’s a bit of male privilege contemplating this alternate world, of course, but I also think it’s something that a lot of women who dismiss feminism also don’t ponder too heavily. The concept that women can control their bodies is as natural to recent generations as the concept that we can have drinking water without cholera – which is to say, such an assumed thing that we forget all of the titanic societal changes that emerged to make that seemingly trivial feature happen.
So of course we’re still having battles over abortion, and birth control, and female reproductive rights. It’d be eerie if we didn’t. We’re dealing with the legacy of a whole culture based at least in part of thinking that sex had consequences, and we removed that like a magician whisking a cloth out from under some wine glasses, and now we have this vestigial set of terrors and ingrained shame fighting against a newer world where in fact we don’t have to worry about that. I’m not saying the fine conservative legislators of Texas are fighting for the right cause – but it’d be like if we suddenly removed the need to eat, and then expected that nobody would fight to protect the legacy of eating animals as a noble and protective cause instead of the gratuitous and then-inexcusable barbarism it would suddenly become.
(Some would argue that it is already. Mayhap they’re right, which only proves my point.)
But sometime just before I was born, women got handed a fantastic new power, one that shifted the very rules of biology. We’re still working that out. And I forget, in my assumption of these scientific miracles, just how fantastic and world-changing that shift continues to be.
Tiny Privileges
Whenever I go out to a restaurant that plays pop music, P!nk’s “Just Give Me A Reason” is playing.
That song is like pouring live ants in my ear.
It’s not that it’s a terrible song – I quite like P!nk, even if I keep wanting to pronounce her name with an alveolar click – but that it doesn’t hold up well on repetition. It’s a simple, repetitive melody that’s not helped at all by Nate Reuss’s overly earnest response. I’d wrung everything I needed to hear out of that song by the fifth time I heard it, and yet every time I walk into Jersey Mike’s for a sandwich, there P!nk is, annoying the crap out of me with this summer’s overplayed ballad.
And I’m grateful.
I’ve worked either at home or in an office for nearly twenty years now, having escaped what looked to be a lifetime of retail. And I remember being stuck listening to the awful loop of whatever it was that our management had decided was pleasurable for our customers – in some cases, the same 45-minute sampler CD that looped over and over again until we found ways to quietly disable it. Having to listen repeatedly to songs we had come to loathe was just another reminder of how insignificant we were in the scheme of things – low-paid grunts encouraged to shut up and smile no matter what the inconvenience.
Having control over what I can listen to? That’s a power. One that might go away if I get another job, a temporary benefit I’m going to relish for today. It makes me feel a little sad for all the millions of people out there being force-fed Ya Mo’ B There one more time. And it makes me appreciate the fact that I’m going to put on Fall Out Boy and listen to it until that wears thin, which it will, and then I can quietly discard it.
In Which I Talk About The Male Orgasm, And Feminism, And Stupid Ferretts
As most of y’all know, I’ve moved my explicit writings on sex over to FetLife, and only refer to ’em here when I think they’re particularly important.
In this case, I think it’s important.
I’ve written an essay over at Fet called “The Guilty Orgasm: One Guy’s Perspective On Guygasms,” which in turn is a response to a much better essay by a woman, titled “Men’s Orgasms: A Woman’s Perspective.” My essay has well over a thousand likes, and a fascinating comment stream of 200 or so comments; hers has an amazing 2,500 likes and 500+ comments, and I think should be mandated reading for men who have sex with women.
I’m not going to summarize overmuch, but the core point is how the societal expectation of how men should be in bed actually in many ways makes sex less enjoyable for both the woman and the man… and the two essays are a really good analysis of how men’s behavior is affected by a patriarchy just as much as women’s is. It’s about vulnerability, and why that’s really difficult for guys in bed.
In some circumstances, I might post the essay on my blog, but in that case, the essay that inspired it would still be behind a login wall, and I’d really encourage you to read both. Unfortunately, bugmenot has blocked FetLife, so it’s harder to log in, but a throwaway email address and two minutes’ worth of creating an account will get you in. It’s an interesting discussion, and worth your time if you can get to it.
Pacific Rim: Written By Ten-Year-Olds, Made By Masters
There’s a lot of hand-wringing in nerd circles because Pacific Rim wasn’t a monster hit; it came in third at the box office this weekend, behind Adam Sandler’s Grown-Ups 2. And that’s because Pacific Rim is a deeply flawed movie that reminds me of, of all movies, Titanic.
Because Pacific Rim is immune to criticism in the same way Titanic is. Yes, it’s full of cheesy dialogue. Yes, some of the action sequences don’t quite make physical sense. Yes, the plot falls apart to the point where you’re actively questioning the plot points as they arise.
It’s also, like Titanic and Starship Troopers before it, tremendous fun if you hop on board.
The thing about Guillermo del Toro is that he swings for the rafters on this; he has a beautiful eye for scope, and so these huge robots feel terrifyingly, gloriously, large. He keeps finding the perfect shot to make them large, putting smaller things next to them so you never forget the scale; a seagull, a school of fish, a schoolgirl. When they’re stomping through downtown Hong Kong, goddamn if they don’t look like they’re titans battling among skyscrapers. You feel small, and strangely ennobled, getting a ringside seat next to such massive violence. And visually, it’s one of the most stylish movies to come along in a while, because everything has this worked-over feel that the original Star Wars had; these robots are banged up, scraped, they feel well-used. If you’re looking for eye candy, your eyes will be swimming in diabetes by the time it is all done.
As for the plot, well, it has one. This film gets by on sheer audacity, with people making such boldly bizarre statements in that Charlton Heston way of delivery that you either buckle under the strain of this bizarre reality and let it invade you, or you despise it. I mean, of course when two-hundred-foot high monsters start invading from the sea, the only answer is to build even larger robots to fight them. Of course, despite this apocalyptic scenario, there are only two scientists in the entire world devoted to analyzing the biology of these bizarre sea creatures. Of course each of the monsters arrives on a schedule, so we can better plan our robot-fighting techniques.
But all my attempts at snark wash off. I was grinning like a schoolboy the entire time, because if you pile absurdity onto absurdity, eventually it collapses into a sort of bizarre Axe Cop-like black hole where you realize Pacific Rim is not trying to emulate reality, it is trying to assemble a whole separately new reality that’s twice as entertaining. It is staring logic in and eye and saying, “…but what fun would that be?”
On one level Pacific Rim is a hot mess of filmmaking… but on the other, it surpasses all of its flaws to be strapped together much like the robots in the movie: functioning despite all disbelief.
Pacific Rim claps its hands together and dares you to mock it. What it loves, it loves hard, and unapologetically. If you’re looking for giant fucking robots to judo-toss Godzilla, well, Guillermo Del Toro said, “I want that to happen.” And he welded all that together with dialogue straight from frommage and special effects to make you gasp and a story that kind of sort of hangs together, and either you decide to hop on board or you hipster your way out of a hell of a lot of fun.
It’s up to you, man. But I’d ride the robot, if you can. It’s worth it. (And doubly so in 3-D, which I hardly ever say.)
I'm Teaching Master Classes In Story Writing: Care To Watch?
In woodworking, they say the difference between the amateur and the pro is that the pro knows how to fix his mistakes. And that’s true. You’re always going to have a door that doesn’t quite fit, or a frame that’s not quite square, or dovetail joint that doesn’t match up; that’s the nature of working with an organic material.
The trick is to know what to do when things go wrong.
And quite a bit has gone wrong for me as I’ve been live-writing my latest story. My first idea didn’t pan out, and I had to be smart enough to recognize when to bail on it after three separate attempts. The second idea wound up having a very tricky plot that was at odds with its emotional impact, and so I wrote literally three passes on the first 2,000 words before I was content to call it even a first draft. And this sucker is due in two weeks.
What I’m doing at the Clarion Echo this year is fixing a story in real time. This is as clear a view as I can give you into my head when I’m analyzing a nonfunctioning story, showing you how I’m diagnosing the problems, erasing the weak parts that aren’t working and uncovering the core so I can bring it back to life. Which, I think, is the kind of information I would have killed for ten years ago back when I was wandering in the woods, wondering why my stories weren’t selling. Stories involve getting tons of tiny details right, and I’m showing you what happens when you focus on the wrong details – and, more importantly, how to strip those inessential elements away to bring out the truth in it.
Plus, you get stories. This week I’ll be rewriting my tale “The Girl Dances, The White Curtain Flutters,” the tale of a girl on a mining asteroid who’s in love with Bollywood movies. That’s a good solid draft I’m pretty sure you’ll enjoy, and then I’ll show you what I need to fix to take it from “good” to “salable, perhaps.”
If that sounds interesting, then I’ll remind you that I am blogging for the Clarion Write-A-Thon, and a mere $5 donation gets you access to six weeks’ worth of intensive analysis from me. ($25 gets you a short story critique, if you desire one.) And even if you’re not at all interested in the nuts and bolts of writing, if you could donate whatever you can, I’d take it as a personal favor – Clarion was the workshop that took me from “struggling nobody” to “Oh, wait, maybe I have heard of that guy” in the world of fiction, and I feel a deep responsibility to my alma mater.
So. $5 and an LJ account will get you in. I’ll do my damndest – have been doing my damndest – to make it worth your while. Please donate?