Physicists! Further Assistance In Breaking Europe?

So a while back, I asked you rampant physicists to assist me in destroying a (fictional) Europe, and I got some fine feedback.  Then I had a bout of Seasonal Affective Disorder, and the experiment tumbled to a halt in a slurry of misplaced depression.
Unfortunately, I am now approaching the stage where I need to write the chapter that explores the wounded Europe – as in, “My muse is going there right now, and if I don’t follow it this very weekend, I’m gonna lose something vital” – and I need some assistance.
So!  If you’re a) willing to deal with some mild spoilers in what happens in The Fix, and b) quickly ponder some questions about how to tweak the laws of physics so things will be awful for humans but survivable in spots, then please email me stat at theferrett@gmail.com.
(As an added bonus, anyone who helps out will get credit in the acknowledgments, and if they want will get to read a beta-draft of The Fix when I eventually finalize the sucker in a few months.)
Because I know what the characters are doing.  I just don’t know where they are. And I’ll fake it if I have to.  But it’ll be less cool without your assistance.

THE FLUX Has A Release Party! Come To Cleveland, October 9th!

The sequel to Flex is coming out in a month, and precisely one month from now we will be partying at Loganberry Books!
Now, I’ll be honest with you: the sequel is kind of a make-or-break moment for me.  Sometimes, the first book does well and people liked it, but for no apparent reason folks don’t want to follow these characters into more narrative.  So I’m nervous about The Flux, because even though I think it’s a way better book than Flex, will anyone show up for Round 2: Fight?
So I debated holding a book party for book 2, and then I asked myself a vital question:
Do I get to eat all the FLUX-themed cupcakes I want that night?
Yes.  Yes, I do.
So there will be a release party at Loganberry Books, one of Cleveland’s finest indie book stores, on Friday, October 9th at 7:00 p.m.  If you’re going, please say you’re attending at the Facebook event page, and share if you feel like it.
There will be new THE FLUX-themed nails, and cupcakes, and a dramatic reading where you find out exactly what happened to Aliyah. Things are… not good.  And you should show up to see how it all turns out.

How Neil Gaiman Inadvertently Gave Me Some Great Advice On Polyamory

When you go to the Clarion Writers’ Workshop, you are given a challenge: write a story a week, for six weeks.  This would be difficult under the best of circumstances, but Clarion is not the best of circumstances: your fellow students, all seventeen of them, are *also* attempting to write a story a week, and if they complete their story then you must read and critique it for them.
The problem is that your classmates are all brilliant.
Clarion’s a lot like Juilliard in that even getting admitted into the program means you have great skill, so everyone there is a helluva writer.  And you could be excused for thinking that we were all in some reality show competition, trying to outwrite each other to devise ZOMG THE BEST STORY THAT WINS THIS WEEK.
…that didn’t really happen, though.
And when Neil Gaiman came for his week to teach us, he sent us off with words that summed up why this head-to-head conflict had never emerged.
“There’s eighteen of you,” he said, amazed, “And none of you are even fishing in the same pond.”
Which was true.  I liked writing comic-booky melodramas, which I think I did pretty well when I wrote my books Flex and The Flux. But Kat Howard was far more influenced by Shakespeare and Tam Lin, and her precise prose sits quite at home in her upcoming novel Roses and Rot.  And Monica Byrne had this madly vibrant mash of world cultures and sex-positive fucking which she distilled into The Girl In The Road.
What Neil was pointing out was how we all had different writing styles – and if we perfected them, we’d never be in competition with each other.  What we’d have to say would be such a unique experience that we would be the only provider.
Now, it’s common to think that, say, STAR WARS is somehow in competition with THE SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION – and on some accountant’s balance sheet somewhere, yes, I suppose that’s true.  But the real competition is “Can I tell a story that’s better than falling asleep in a warm bed on an autumn night?  Can I tell a story that’s unique enough that you need to go back to it again and again?”
And if you tell the story that’s yours, and tell it right, people will make time to listen.
So many movies failed because they thought they were competing with STAR WARS, and they weren’t – they were competing with themselves to find something interesting that a thousand other movies weren’t already saying.
I can’t best Monica’s grasp of melting-pot cultures – and it’d be foolish for me to try, she travels to Iran and other foreign countries, that’s her strength.  I can’t beat Kat’s grasp of poetry; she bathes in fine words on a daily basis, you can see her whole body light up when she fits the correct word into place.
But I can be me.  I can unearth my quirky humor and my deep love of weird characters, and I can make something so uniquely a function of me that you can’t get anything like this anywhere else.  Maybe you like Flex, maybe you don’t, but what’s there is unlike any other author.
And that’s the way polyamory works, too.  You see people getting concerned about what their lovers’ lovers do – is he better in bed?  Does she like more outdoorsy activities than I do? They’re smarter, they know more about politics, I don’t read the New York Times.
Like Neil said: none of you are even fishing in the same pond.  Yes, what your lover often likes about their other paramours are qualities that you do not possess.  This is standard.  Your lovers are stocked full of you, in all your you-ness abundance; if they dated a partner who was exactly like you, that might be more of a problem, because apparently you weren’t providing enough of this you experience.
So yeah, they’ll find partners who do things that you don’t.  But this isn’t a competition.  You should not run out and start reading the Times or take up bodybuilding just to make sure you’re still in the game.
I know, because it’s scary sometimes for me to look at other writers with their novels and think They’ve got more PR, they got better blurbs, this person I like is a fan of theirs and they’re not a fan of me.  I worry that somehow I sabotaged my own success by writing about donut psychology and videogamemancy instead of, I dunno, whatever the person I’m envious this week wrote.
That’s all the usual writer-insecurity burbling to the surface.  Then I remember: if I do things right, their success will not crush my own.  I’m my own damn unique voice, and I’ll appeal to different segments.
This is my pond, and I am learning to fish in it to appeal to the sorts of people who want someone like me. I won’t accomplish that by making clumsy attempts to be someone I’m not, nor will I accomplish that by looking over at the other ponds and moaning about how much bigger they are.
What you’ve got is you.  In fact, all you’ve really got is you.  So find what you like about yourself, and make more of that.  And trust that people can like both what other people can provide and also you, in all your delightful youness.
There’s a lot of ponds.  There’s a lot of possibilities in fiction, and in love, and in life.
You don’t have to be all of them.  You just have to be something that’s not in the other ponds.

The SQL NULL; How Computer Nerdery Can Ease Your Life

Bear with me while I fog y’all up with nerdiness. But trust me. It comes back around to giving you a concept that might make your life a little easier.
(Assuming you don’t have this concept down already, in which case, hey, it’s like putting on that “Greatest Hits” album of old favorites.)
Anyway. Computers store data. If you give a business your name, they’re going to want your address. If you give a business your address, they’re going to want a phone number to call. If you give them a phone number to call, they’re going to want an email address to spam you…
And so on.
When computers store that data, they can store the number you gave them: 555-555-5555. That gets plunked down into the “phone number” field in their storage.
Or, if you lie and say you don’t have a phone, you’re a homeless man who will never contact them again, they will dutifully enter a blank space in that field. That means, definitively, “This customer does not have a phone number.”
Yet if you’re a comp-sci major, you’ll remember the third value that can go in that field:
NULL.
NULL means “We don’t know.”
Putting a NULL in the phone number means, “This customer might have a phone number, they might not, but we have no current way of knowing what it is.” A customer service rep might enter that if you didn’t answer all their questions, but they wanted to keep your address.
A “don’t know” is different than a “Doesn’t.” A customer rating a movie as “Haven’t seen” is actually different than a customer not having told us whether they’ve seen this movie or not. And if you’re doing queries of data, you often want to be able to look at what you don’t know.
And NULL “don’t-know” values get treated weirdly, particularly in math. What’s 2 + NULL? Well, if you turn that into 2 + “We don’t know”, the answer is obviously “We still don’t know” – which means that any equation that involves a NULL in it emerges as the mathematical equivalent of a shrug. We don’t know!
And the way this nerdery applies to ordinary life is that I said this on Twitter the other day:
“It’s always weird when total strangers tell me they’re disappointed in me. I only get worried when people I respect tell me I’ve fucked up.”
To which someone replied:
“Just because you don’t know someone doesn’t mean they don’t have a valid point.”
And I thought, “That’s potential NULL behavior.”
Admittedly, I phrased it wrong – I should have said “I only get worried when people I respect say they’re disappointed,” as the feedback of strangers can be of deep concern when they present valid reasons – but the mathematical point is that most people seem to think there’s only two ways to go:
1) The disappointment of these people I’ve never interacted with is something to be concerned about, or:
2) The disappointment of these people I’ve never interacted with *is not* something to be concerned about.
Me? I get by with a healthy dosage of NULL.
I don’t know these people. I cannot say whether their judgment is sound enough for me to be concerned about one way or the other by the withdrawal of their approval – at least not without research I’m not willing to do right now. I don’t have to cling to a binary judgment that this is good or bad – I can simply say UNKNOWN VALUE, and treat it as such.
NULLs are really handy in all sorts of places.

• Is my ex-girlfriend a better person now? NULL. (I’m not willing to hang out with them and find out, but maybe they’ve improved. Who knows? They hurt me enough in the past that I’m unwilling to risk it.)
• Is this person who said a dumb thing online truly as a bigot in every way? NULL. (They said one dumb thing, but everyone fucks up once in a while. Then again, maybe investigation would turn up a lot of other dumb things they’ve said that leads to a reasonable conclusion they *are* that bad. Yet with only one data point, all we can logically say is “They said this dumb thing for unknown reasons.”)
• Is this blogger as good as they present themselves online? NULL. (As I know all too well, it’s easy to look good when you control the stage!)

And I think once you internalize a bit of NULL-ness, you relax as you realize that you don’t need to have a snap judgment on everything.
Fitting every unknown into a “yes” or “no” gets exhausting, anyway. You start to get attached to that answer. Once you’ve decided on your answer with your limited data, your mind starts to defend it, and then suddenly that unknown person who’s disappointed in you slots firmly into one category or another. If it turns out that someone who you’ve categorized as “not worth your time” starts following up with other good points, you fight the data (“This person’s saying things I respect!”) because you’ve come to a conclusion (“They’re not worth listening to!”) and everyone hates to be proven wrong.
Whereas with a NULL, I’m literally not saying whether the disappointment of someone I’ve never met is worthwhile or not. It could be either way. But I talk to a lot of strangers, and if I followed up on every unknown in my life, I’d never get anything done.
Leaving it unknown is fine. With the NULL, I can wait for further data to present itself, if it does, and then form other decisions from there.
Learn to love the NULL. You do not have to possess an answer for everything. And your life gets a lot easier when you realize, “Hey, I don’t know, and I may not necessarily have to know, and this ambiguous state is okay.”  You can free up a lot of cycles withholding judgment, enabling you more energy to go investigate the things that do matter deeply to you.
And you can do things without having to have a foregone conclusion. As I write this, is this a really obvious thing to say? Or is it something that might be of use to enough people that it’s worth publishing?
As I hit the submit button, my answer is NULL.  And that, too, is okay.

A Comment So Dumb, I Had To Memorialize It

So here’s my dirty little secret: nothing I do over here on this little corner of the web causes much fuss, these days.
Which is not to say that I don’t post my Social Justice Warrior-style essays – but I’ve been doing this schtick for so long that people have come to know what to expect.  I hear some of my friends going, “My Facebook, oh, it’s so filled with angry conservatives!”  Whereas I’ve been posting for so long that either the conservatives have learned to live with me, or they’ve fled.  And I’m not popular enough that the opposition will come over here just to make fun of me.
So occasionally I’ll write a piece like “Why Straight Dudes Don’t Get As Offended As Normal People Do,” and it’ll get linked around, and maybe I’ll get a few extra thousand hits – but my comments section looks pretty much the same.  I am, largely, preaching to the same choir.
But on FetLife…
I cross-post some of my political essays to FetLife, where it often reaches their “Kinky and Popular” front page, and hooooly shit do I get some frothing opposition.  Which is good!  Meeting opposition is where you have the potential to change minds!  So most of my spirited debates are over on FetLife these days.
And posting my “Straight White Dudes” essay has been a cauldron of amusement.  People started keeping a tally of the number of straight white cis guys who posted comments without even bothering to read to the end.
And it was there, my friends, that my favorite comment ever originated.
One particularly strident dude took me to task at length for being a sad windbag.  When do words ever change anything?  You’re just a sad sack couch potato, your side doesn’t have any effective protests, you’re useless and worthless and you name it.
I commented back.  I got two private emails from people warning me “DO NOT ENGAGE WITH THIS BOZO, HE NEVER SHUTS UP.”   And lo, he didn’t, going on at further length about the things I did and didn’t do.  (It doesn’t help that I wasn’t arguing my case as well as I could have.)
Eventually, he unleashes this gem:
“In full disclosure I make a lot of money. So I BUY the trappings of privilege, I didn’t inherit it and it wasn’t given to me. When I started my business I didn’t have two nickels to rub together. And I had exactly ZERO privilege to trade on. I didn’t make it because I was White or a man, or had a wife that was born female. I did it because I was willing to do what other people wouldn’t. Got my hands very dirty and handled some truly disgusting shit, but it paid well.
“And then I risked everything I had and took risks. I got lucky, but I worked very, very hard. There were no springs in my boots as I’ve heard used as a common metaphor. And among almost all the small business owners I know the story is pretty similar.
“We rose by our own hands. Yes we had employees. Capitalized on opportunities where we could and now we get to be told that we are to blame for your missed opportunities in this life.”
And actually, even though I hadn’t discussed privilege at all with him, nor had I blamed him for any missed opportunities, I actually did feel some connection with the dude.  I feel that a lot in discussions of privilege – people going, “I worked hard, this is mine, how dare you say I had it easy?” Because hell, I worked hard to get where I am, I could see how people can feel a sense of that pride ripped away from them.
So I wrote a long and rather heartfelt comment that was a reiteration of my essay “If It’s Not Privilege, What Is?” I talked about how I was a depressive, and had twenty-five years of struggle to get my novel published, and I missed out on parties and lost girlfriends and wrote for three hours a night to fulfill my dream –
– and yet despite all that hard work to get where I was, I still had to acknowledge that women have it harder, people with chronic illnesses have it harder, poor people have it harder.  And that’s why I believe that “You worked hard to get what you got” and “Others can have it harder” is not a contradiction.
And despite the fact that a link to my book is literally the first thing on my FetLife profile, this was my favorite comment of all time:
“Then I guess you have to keep hustling don’t you Ferrett. I left that part out. I got up today and knew I had to keep running to stay ahead of the crashing wave.
“See there is no resting on your laurels. It doesn’t work like that. Sorry bud there is no case of bud lite waiting for you after you type another 500 words. You have to be able to sell something.
“Maybe if this isn’t working you should try something else. I realize that sounds harsh, I don’t mean to say you aren’t good at it, but maybe there is no market for what you are selling?”
Wanna know what it looks like when a dude loses an argument?
It looks like that.  And oh, it’s the best feeling in the world.
Despite the fact that he’d made whole posts about who I was and how I acted and how he knew my kind, he didn’t even know I’d sold a book.  (Or two, if you count the sequel dropping in six weeks.  Or, if you’re really into that sort of thing, three books, as I just sold the third in the series.)
He didn’t even read the first paragraph of my profile.  Hadn’t Googled me, hadn’t checked, just assumed that because I was an SJW I was a failure.  (In the way a lot of straight white cis dude are claiming I make assumptions about them, even though I acknowledged those stereotypes were unfair in the essay itself.)
So yeah.  It’s the best feeling in the world for me, watching him now twist and turn, attempting to say things like “I didn’t read your profile because I didnt think enough of you to spend much time researching your life” and accusing me of a “clumsy attempt at a trap” and…
Doesn’t matter.  He just lost the game.  All his authority, dribbled away.
You rarely get to watch such a magnificent foot-shooting, but there we have it!

Why Straight White Dudes Don't Get Offended As Often As Normal People Do

“You know, I get insulted, too,” the straight white cis dude says.  “I read articles that mischaracterize my experience as a straight white cis guy.  And when that happens, do I bitch about it on the Internet?  No!  I just suck it up and move on.
“So I guess,” the straight white cis dude concludes, “I’m not easily offended.”
Hold on there, hoss.  Lemme suggest another potential conclusion:
It may be that you’re not insulted nearly as much.
I’d guess that as a straight white cis dude, I’d guess that your experience in things means that your very existence is not routinely forgotten. Nobody in the majority cultures goes, “Another movie consisting exclusively of male leads has hit #1 at the box office?  How could this happen?  Is there really a market for male movies?” And then, weeks later, forget that this trend of “male movies” has been ongoing since, oh, the 1960s.
Nobody in the mainstream cultures goes, “Oh, yeah, fuck, I guess you might be attracted to women, sure.  People do that.  But are you sure you don’t want this dick?”
Nobody in mainstream cultures just assumes you’d like to have transition surgery and that your dressing in men’s clothing is some form of weird attempt to fit in.
What I generally find people saying when they say “I guess I’m not easily offended” is actually closer to “I don’t actually have that many people who offend me.” In general, what these dudes are actually saying is “Ninety-time times out of a hundred, people acknowledge and support me, and I quietly assume that as my birthright. And that hundredth time someone doesn’t acknowledge me, well, that means I’m not easily offended!”
Which is a lot like a five-foot-ten guy saying, “Well, I’m not picky about my furniture.  I can sit anywhere.”  Which may be true, but it’s overlooking the fact that as a guy of average height, most furniture is made to fit you.  If society had quietly decided that the average person was four-foot-ten, or six-foot-ten, then you might spend a little more time in the furniture shop finding something comfortable.
Or not.  There are genuinely some dudes who can fall asleep on rocks.  Just like there are some gay trans black women who can sleep through bonfires of Internet hatred. Some folks are, in fact, genuinely not easily offended, and maybe that’s you.
But my point is, it’s kind of difficult to say whether you’re easily offended when you have an entire society dedicated to reaffirming your existence.  You don’t get erased in 99% of the circumstances.  You don’t get stereotyped.  You don’t have people pigeonholing you.
Yet when I talk to not-easily-offended straight white cis dudes like this, you know what really pisses them off?
Essay titles like “Why Straight White Dudes Don’t Get Offended As Often As Normal People Do.”
A lot of these very same dudes who are all “It’s not important to put gay/minority/trans representations into things!” and “That was just a joke!” when it comes to pointing at other people get veeeery angry when you stereotype them.  “I really fucking hate the way you make ‘straight white cis dude’ sound like an insult, Ferrett,” they’ll say, frothing at the mouth.  “We’re not all that way.  I’m not this parody you’re writing about!”
Well, shit, bro, are you not easily offended?  Or are you simply not easily offended when things are generally not aimed in your direction?
Hell, you’ll see a lot of straight white cis dudes getting angry by the mere fact of being called straight white cis dudes, because they hate the label, don’t you realize we’re people, you’re racist for labelling me.  And that’s a funny thing, because you are straight, you are white, you are cis, you are a dude, and I’m gonna suggest the reason you hate having your whiteness and your cisness and your straightness called out is because up until now, everyone quietly assumed all those things were normal.
Having your central identities marked as different makes you feel freakish and othered, and you fucking hate it.
So again, are you not easily offended?  I’d argue that maybe you are easily offended.  Maybe you’ve just not had to experience what a lot of marginalized communities endure on a regular basis.
Maybe you should take this offense at the way “straight white cis dude” does, in fact, strip off layers of who you are to replace them with a stereotype – and instead of using that anger to defend your domain, maybe you could look at how other stripes of people are more routinely erased, replaced, and debased, and start asking, “Shit, how can I not do that to them?”
And even if you are not easily offended, that doesn’t necessarily mean that “everyone should not be offended” is a great way to be.  I myself have such a tremendous pain tolerance that I walked around for four days with a burst appendix and thought it was a tetchy stomach virus.  But I would be a stupendous dick if I went, “Well, I don’t experience that much pain, so why do we need all of these painkillers?  Just suck it up and deal, like I do.”
And even if that was something we wanted to do, would it be wise?  Sometimes being stoic doesn’t fix the problem.  Like me.  I was very stoic to an illness that was actually fucking killing me – I am lucky to be alive – and maybe complaining is the proper method to fix problems like, I dunno, people forgetting that entire alternative existences exist.
If you’re really not easily offended, then maybe you should demonstrate that  invulnerability by going, “Huh. I wonder if they have a point” when someone unloads on you instead of frowning and saying, “Complaining is bad!”  Maybe you could use that amazing superpower to better other people’s lives instead of shrugging off potentially valid complaints as some form of weak whining.
You’re in a position to do some real good, if you’re not that easily offended.  You can make a positive difference.
I’d like to ask you to think about how to do that.