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.)

Three Thoughts On John Carmack's New VR Headsets

John Carmack, the guy who programmed Doom and Quake, is applying his considerable talent towards improving VR headsets.  Here, he gives a (highly recommended!) twenty-minute talk on why VR headsets don’t work and why his approach comes closer to working, which I found fascinating for a couple of reasons.
1)  John emanates a tendency I’ve noticed in the “good” geek world: accepting and acknowledging problems.  Which is to say that if you talk to a certain style of geek about his favorite X, that X does everything perfectly – and anything it doesn’t do is something you’re stupid for wanting.  Which is why, despite our abundance of tech, so many problems remain – you have this sort of geek tunnel-vision where they fall in love with a technology, and then they forget that this technology has limits, and rather than working to expand those limits, they start circling the wagons and explaining defensively that this isn’t doable, and besides that’s not what’s important.
Note how John does not do this.  If anything, this presentation is full of encoded apologies – it doesn’t do this, but we want it to.  It should do this, but the technology’s not there yet.  Some people experienced blurriness, and we’re not sure why yet, but we’ll get it.  John’s a smart guy, and while he’s clearly loving the tech, he’s much more concerned with making it do what he wants it to ultimately do, as opposed to working within the limitations it imposes.
This is what I consider to be a “good” geek in that competent nerds may love a tech, but they never forget that the tech exists to accomplish a goal.  And they never get so wrapped up in the joys of doing Stuff that they forget that Stuff, cool as it is, still isn’t really all that impressive yet.  John’s clearly proud of what he’s done, but he has a vision – a 360-degree vision – and he is not removing his eyes from that end goal.
2)  The article itself talks about how impenetrable John’s talks are, because he’s a smart guy who uses a lot of big words – which led me to believe that I’d spend twenty minutes hearing some UNIX guy blathering on about device driver conflicts.  But aside from one or two words I didn’t know, I found the talk itself surprisingly easy to follow. Carmack’s a good teacher, and this was highly educational about why current VR is so dissatisfying.  So am I that smart, or is the PC Gamer guy that dumb, or is PC Gamer purposely making it sound like Carmack is obtuse so their readers will feel brilliant when they don’t have problems following along?
3)  John Carmack is about half a second away from bursting into a Gilbert Gottfried impression.  At all times.

Just A Reminder

Tomorrow, my crazy friend Angie is going to ride a roller coaster for eight hours for charity. She is offering an Amazon gift certificate.  She is paying for her own hotel.
Maybe you should sponsor her.

Conversations Emanating From A Disturbed Mind

Yesterday, Gini smooched our girlfriend Bec, then and broke out in a rash so nasty it required two Benadryl for Gini not to scratch her lips off.  Bec apologized.
“It’s okay,” Gini said.  “You were using the same Burt’s Bees lip balm as always. I would never in a million years have guessed that would give me a rash.”  Then her phone rang, and she went off to talk to a client.  By the time she got back, Bec and I had had A Talk.
“We’ve been thinking,” I said.  “And you’re underselling yourself.  We’re pretty sure you could do it in five hundred, tops.”
“…What?”
“A million years is a long time,” I explained.  “That’s, like, twenty thousand of your lifetimes to date.  If you’d really thought about it, I’m sure you could knock it out of the park in a few centuries.”
“…knock what?”
“Guessing what would give you a rash.  Admittedly, it’s pretty specific, but if you do it full-time…”
“Wait a minute!” Gini said.  “I get bored after five minutes of guessing games with you!  I don’t want to spend the next million years endlessly guessing what might give me a rash!  That’s a horrible fate, wandering around for all eternity having to do nothing but wondering what might give me hives!”
“I’ve taken that into account,” I replied serenely.  “I figure it’ll take you two centuries of wandering the Earth, resenting your status, lamenting to a cold and uncaring God the strange and inexplicable task he has bequeathed to you and you alone.  After that: three centuries of daily guessing.  Tops.”
Soon after that, we got into a debate about whether we were having a debate or an argument.  Good times, good times.