Three Photos Of How We're Doing

So, I am in the middle of my Seasonal Affective Disorder, which meant that I spent the weekend curled up and trying to stay alive.  But before that, my beautiful daughter Erin came to visit, and we all went to the Velvet Tango Room.



It is little happies like this that I cling to when I am sad.

Why I Don't Bitch About My Girlfriends On The Internet

It is remarkably easy to convince your child that Santa exists.  After all, the child trusts you implicitly – why wouldn’t they take your word when you tell them there’s a red-suited jolly guy who brings them presents via a venison-powered transportation system?
Still, it’s a little declasse to do victory laps around the block, yelling, “See?  I convinced Virginia that yes, there is a Santa Claus!  What wondrous proof that Santa exists!”
Yet people do it.  They do it all the damn time, particularly when it’s about ex-boyfriends or arguments they’re having with soon-to-be ex-girlfriends.
The reason I’m writing this essay is something a friend of mine wrote a while ago: “The high road sure is a frustrating bitch, sometimes. Luckily, there’s all that rewarding moral superiority.”  That stuck with me, because I worry that’s how I come off when I tell people, “I try not to blog about the arguments I’m having with my lovers” – as if the reason I avoid airing my dirty laundry in public is because I’m just naturally superior.
No, it’s because I’ve learned the feedback you get is nonsensical and misleading.
There’s one of three reasons people read what you write on the Internet:
1)  They’ve come to trust your opinion enough to want to know what you have to say.  (Thankfully, this is the most common reason.)
2)  They think you’re a fascinating train wreck, and want to see what sort of dysfunction you’re up to this week.
3)  They think you’re an active hazard, and your blog is a lighthouse warning of what deplorable fuckeries you plan on committing.
Now, in the case of #1, you’ve built up a big ol’ well of trust to draw from.  People have showed up because you’re either a good friend who they like, or because you’ve dropped enough truth-bombs that they’ve become a fan of your blogsmithery.  In either case, whenever you post that Facebook status, you are talking to people swimming in a deep pool of “Benefit of the Doubt.”
In other words, you’re talking to an audience that is on your side already.  And as long as whatever you write doesn’t insult them directly, well hey, all your complaints are gonna sound good!  I mean, if I’m in an argument and dash off some Chinese fortune cookie complaint like, oh, “You can’t have true love without true trust,” then twenty people will like it on Facebook and the comment threads with my friends will be about how yes, true love needs a partner who believes in you.
But like all advice, that’s good in a vacuum.  What if my wife’s complaint is that I’m spending all my free nights with a single girl she has never authorized, a girl who she knows is deeply attracted to me?  What if she’s come home to find us cuddled up on the couch, knowing that I’ve been texting her at mysterious times and never letting Gini see what I wrote… And then, aggrieved after she’s been haranguing me for more detail on what’s going on, I flee to my Twitter and write angrily about her neediness and lack of belief in me?
NOTE: This has not happened.  But if it damn well did, then my complaint of “You can’t have love without trust” becomes an obfuscated complaint of, “Gini doesn’t trust me when I’m doing sketchy things.”
But hey!  I write the posts, so I get to frame how all this turns out.  And I’m talking to a veeeeery Santa-friendly audience.  They all vouch for my status as a Good Guy.  And what I get are tons of attaboys, and you keep dropping that wisdom, and lots of positive feedback for something that I could well be completely wrong on in the first place.
In other words, what I get when I post about my troubles to the Internet is an echo chamber, telling me how wonderfully correct I am.  It’s the kid, hanging the stockings by the fireplace.  Because relationships are relative things – it’s right in the fucking word, people – any complaint I have, no matter how fucktastically incorrect, can be extracted and made to be true for someone.
“The beautiful thing about being a grown-up is that you get to choose your own family.” – Charlie Manson
“When all else fails, you just have to believe in yourself.” – Jenny McCarthy, head of the anti-vaccine movement
“When you find the right person, you have to follow your heart.” – Britney Spears
See?  All true for someone… But not the people I’ve attributed them to.
And what’ll happen if I keep posting discussions on what’s wrong with my girlfriends?  Some of the #1s will automatically take my side, whereas many others will quietly slide into the #2s (train wreck) and the #3s (uses your blog as a warning).  But they won’t post, generally.  Why would they?  Your blog/Facebook/Twitter is generally a positive space, unless you’ve been so psychodramatic that you’ve actually edged out all the #1s and now the #2s and #3s are in the majority.
(NOTE: This sad state can be assumed if you’re in high school.  Everyone’s nutty in high school.  Be prepared to be flayed alive, should you complain.)
So when you do post, what do you actually accomplish?  You get a feeling of moral correctness that is not at all justified.  You get friends, using this as an excuse to tell you how wonderfully wise you are.  You get some people quietly stepping away, not wanting to be on the train that’s rapidly heading for another collision.  And you piss off the person you’re posting about, at which point they often post their own interpretations of what’s wrong with your relationship, which gets their own cascades of “Attaboys” and “You go, girl!” and “Santa loves me, this I know, for my friend she told me so!”
What you do not get:

• Actual wisdom.
• Forward movement with your relationship.
• Presents from Santa.

As such, I try not to post about a personal foible until it’s so dead that nobody even thinks about it any more… And usually, I make damn sure that it’s clear that I was the one at fault.  Because otherwise, what I get is a big ol’ tide of supportive nothing.
Don’t get me wrong, pals.  I appreciate your being on my side.  But I want that to be because I’m on the side of genuine truth and justice, not just because I sound good.

The Only Way To Survive Was To Become Legend: Musings On Old Vs. New Videogame Design

These days, people play videogames to pretend to be a badass.  In my day, you had to be a badass.
I say this because I finished playing Prototype 2 this weekend, the epitome of the “Press X to kick ass” style of videogame that’s become increasingly prevalent.  You play a virus-infected shapeshifter who slurps up enemies, runs up buildings, and slices tanks in half.
Yet none of this is difficult.
To hijack a tank, you press B to grab it and then mash X to tear its gun off.  The military rains useless gunfire down on you while you mash Y to Hammerfist them into oblivion.  You can fall infinite distances and never get hurt, soaring over the landscape before slaughtering a crowd full of people by mistake as you land in a thunderclap.  Even the boss battles are rendered easy, as you destroy a cancerous giant one limb at a time, your targeting system telling you which leg is vulnerable.
You’re doing these incredibly difficult things, but it boils down to “mash these buttons.”  You feel like a God because hell, you’re destroying the city block, but none of it is difficult once you master the control scheme.  I got through the game in less than a week, playing part-time.  Which is pretty much the same as God of War, wherein you perpetrate legendary violence through a series of Simon Says events, and Mass Effect and Dragon Age wherein you can destroy entire caverns full of mooks right off the bat, or Grand Theft Auto.
Videogames have made power fantasies trivial.  Here!  Do this quicktime event to DESTROY THE UNIVERSE!  You pressed X, then Y, then A?  You, sir, are a badass.
Which is interesting, because the worlds of my old videogames were designed to kill you quickly, so the next quarter could be inserted.  Their whole profit margin involved shuffling you to that “GAME OVER” screen as soon as possible.
When I was a kid, the world was designed to show you how insignificant you were.  You weren’t the center of a universe that was waiting hand-and-foot for you to come along and rescue them; you were a small, pizza-shaped wedge beset by four ghosts, any of whom could kill you by touching you.  You were a spaceship at the bottom of a screen, harangued by hundreds of flying, shooting enemies.  You were a small spaceship struggling to survive in a deadly asteroid field.  You died easily, trivially, unfairly.
Your only way to survive was to become legend.
There was no easy way to do this, aside from applying hard-earned skill.  You plunked quarters into the damn machine until you figured out the patterns, honed your reflexes, slid into the game’s rhythm.  Bit by bit, you lasted longer: two minutes. Five.  Ten.  If you were exceptionally good you might last fifteen, at which point other pasty nerds would edge forward to watch you, knowing they were seeing something that few got to witness.  Sometimes you’d show them screens that had only existed in rumor before.
There was no in-game reward, and little out-of-game reward, as videogames weren’t particularly cool then.  But the right people would know that you had that high score, your three letters your call sign (“WTS” for me early on, “WZL” now), the unremarkable skill.
There were no faux-skills to be built up.  You had to learn a real skill – perhaps one that wasn’t usable anywhere anywhere else, but one that set you apart from other people.  You didn’t pretend to be a badass soldier – you became a badass player, and that in turn gave you a strange and ephemeral confidence.  You’d watch the novices play and realize how far you’d come.  You’d put the quarter in and feel invincible.
Thing is, I spent maybe fourteen hours devastating New York in Prototype 2.  I tore the heads of goliaths, I firebombed secret bunkers, I fought the US Army and the mercenary forces of watches to a standstill, then defeated Alex Mercer in an epic rooftop battle.
Yet none of that meant one-tenth as much to me as my legendary Ms. Pac-Man run, where I spent two agonizing hours racking up a personal best score with my Dad and wife at my side cheering me on.  Because in one game, all of my prowess was granted to me by a developer who wanted me to feel good about myself.  In another, I had painstakingly built up an arsenal of skills over the years, stealing prowess from a developer who wanted me to die, die, and die now.
The design has changed.  And I wonder how that affects people today.

I Want To Speculate About Legend of Korra. And Mad Men. Talk With Me.

There are two shows that have been causing a lot of discussion in my house, each about as diametrically opposed as media can get: Legend of Korra and Mad Men.
So, of course, I want to talk about both of them.  Light spoilers may apply, but I’ve gone to some efforts to obfuscate details of what have happened – though gloves will be off in the comments.
If you haven’t been watching Legend of Korra, you’re missing out on one of the best action-adventure cartoons in a long time.  Like the recent Star Trek movie, no knowledge of past Avatars is necessary, but you get an emotional tie to the old references if you have seen Airbender.
The big question is, of course: Who is Amon, the masked leader of the anti-bender faction?
Being a kids’ series, Korra’s gone the route of peppering the show with so many dicks that frankly, it could be any number of obstructionist gits.  For a while, I thought Amon was clearly Asami, as she is a) an avid follower of pro-bending and the cheating team got decimated, b) the daughter of a rich industrialist who can manufacture anti-bending tech at will, and c) infiltrated the Avatar’s camp by literally running into Mako.  But what happened in “The Aftermath” indicates that this is probably not true.
The too-obvious choice was Tarrlok, the sneeringly evil politician, and if the show had chosen him to be Amon I’d have torn my teeth out.  But the most recent show seems to indicate that Tarrlok has his own agenda that’s overlapping with Amon but not parallel (note how clearly I am avoiding spoilers here).  So while Gini’s not ruling it out, I am.  So let’s go nuts with the speculation: Who do you think is Amon, and why?
In other, subtler, news, the big twist of Mad Men is what Joan chose to do at the end of the last episode – which was heartbreaking, ugly, and stayed with me for a couple of days afterwards.  It was the implosion of a lot of Joan’s dreams, conspired by everyone at the company, and I think it was the big watercooler moment of a season that had already had a ton of them.  (Was there ever a more realistic depiction of an acid trip than Roger’s LSD shenanigans?  I think not.)
That said, I’ve seen some people complaining that Joan’s reaction was forced, that big strong Joan would never act like that.  And that’s something I feel is completely inaccurate.  Like everyone else on Mad Men, Joan’s a complex character, and her primary drive has been to go with the way the wind is blowing strongest.  She chooses her shots within that, yes, but unlike Peggy who’s decided to buck the system, Joan’s decided to surf it.  She has her own agenda, and she makes good choices within that realm, but realistically she dresses sexy because she realizes that a) men are going to treat her like a sex object anyway, and b) given that choice, this is the easiest way to get what she wants.  So she uses that for her benefit, while still maintaining her integrity.
With what happened last week, well, it became clear that no one in the company was going to protect her.  Pete was the slimy little prick he’s always been, Lane was quietly manipulating her for his own hidden ends (and I think he’s gotta be the guy in the elevator shaft, since now he’s got nowhere to hide), Bert wanted his hands clean, and Don walked away in disgust (but Joan didn’t know that).
(The only forced bit, to me, was the complete abstention of Roger, who theoretically cares about Joan and you’d think would have some input.  That absence seemed damning, particularly because honestly I’m not sure that Roger wouldn’t ultimately told Joan to do it.  But that may be a matter of time, or cold orchestration on the part of the writers.)
So to me, when Joan discovered that she had been isolated, given the double-whammy of everyone there hating her if she didn’t and despising her if she did, she went the way that got her a bunch of cold cash.  It was not a pleasant choice.  It was a delightful scene where she turned her back at the right moment, forcing this to happen on her own terms.  But Joan’s compelling nature is that she actually bends with the culture in a way that appears to be completely on her own terms, but often is a small choice made while bowing to outside pressures that even Joan cannot escape from.  And she never, ever lets that heartache show.
So I think it was in character, and one of the creepiest episodes of television ever.  And there are two episodes left in the season.  I can’t wait to see what happens next.

A Thought On Cons And Raconteurism

So Jaym Gates linked to this piece – The Ten Commandments Of Flirting, Or: How Not To Be Creepy At Atheist Conventions.  She said, “I want to include these rules in every con packet EVER. These rules aren’t just for atheist conventions.”  So of course, I clicked, because I really don’t want to be That Guy, and was pleasantly happy to realize that (I think) I follow all of them.
This quote on respecting people’s time stuck out, however:
“If you want to tell someone else an anecdote, make it short and get right to the point.”
As someone who tells a lot of stories, I realized that there are certain tales I just don’t tell at conventions.  I’ve learned that my more involved tales (like this little doozy) won’t work, because con space really doesn’t allow a story of over a minute; people are coming and going and interrupting to say hello to old friends, and other folks are wanting their space to share, and if there’s a lot of setup then you basically have to arm-wrestle the table into listening to you.
It’s not like a dinner, where if you say, “This one takes a bit,” you can get some room for a five-minute monologue.  As people’s attentions wander, you’ll get a third of the way through the story and get to the first punchline, and people will think you’re done.  So if you’re committed, you have to either wave someone to shut up, or start up again after they tell their story, both of which are kind of dickish.
No big deal.  I just tell short stories.  And in the hullabaloo, sometimes I don’t even finish those.  It’s cool.  I’m there to listen to other people, not to spout my old tales to other people.
But it’s a little weird to realize that subconsciously, I’ve not only got enough stories to tell, but I have marked many of them as space-appropriate.  This one’s a good con story.  This one’s a good one to tell sitting in my living room.  This one’s a good one to tell in a crowd of four to six people.  I can think of a story and instantly know what social milieu I think it fits into, which is an odd thing to realize about how much I think about stories.
Then again, I’ve sat at the con when That Guy keeps going, “No, no, you gotta listen, and then – get this – this happened.”  And at a con, no tale is amusing enough to be worth hijacking an entire table’s worth of people for ten minutes.  Just trust me on that.
 

How Many Times Could You Ride A Roller Coaster? Okay, How About Winning An Amazon Gift Certificate Instead?

Would you ride a roller coaster for eight hours?  I wouldn’t.  I’d get sick and light-headed and probably dispense all sorts of crazy vomit-style fluids.
What if it was to help terminally ill children have the vacation of their dreams?
Well, my friend Angie is both crazy and brave, and will be headed down to Cedar Point next week to spend the weekend bobbing up and down at frightfully high speeds to raise funds for Give Kids The World, which gives free vacations to very sick children.  This sort of bodily abuse something I could never subject myself to, but this is just one of many reasons I admire Angie.
In addition, Angie is wise and realizes that incentives are needed, so she is offering a $25 Amazon gift certificate to anyone who donates and correctly guesses how many laps she will do over the day.  For your calculations:

• Yes, Angie is allowed to take breaks off the rollercoaster, so she’s not strapped in all day.  But she is both brave and enjoys roller coasters, so I suspect she will spend more time moving than not.
• She will be there from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
• The coaster itself takes 2 minutes and 20 seconds.
• If she’s not taking a break, Angie can just stay in her seat between rides, which is the real guessing zone; how long will the loading/unloading process takes?  Angie thinks two minutes, but there’s some play here because one suspects there will be more than a few laps where no one actually gets off.
• Debates in the comments about how many times you could do it, or Angie could, are not only allowed but encouraged.

So.  Donate some money to sick kids, and bet on Angie’s stomach.  You’ll be doing some genuine good in the world, and you have a chance to win some nice merch of your own.

A Brief Rant On Weight Loss

You know what happens when you lose weight?  You’re the star of the show.  Everyone goes wide-eyed when you enter the room, tells you how good you look, asks you what your secret is.  You get your moment on stage where everyone stops and kisses your butt.
And then we wonder why women are so unhealthily obsessed with weight.
Look, I’m not opposed to losing weight as part of a healthy program.  But I do wonder what it would be like if we had the same astonished reaction to someone wearing a button saying “I think I’m wonderful just the way I am” and everyone crowded around to tell them how sexy they were and asked them how they did it.  Because there’s a constant stream of positive feedback for altering yourself to fit society’s needs, but pretty much zippo for happy self-acceptance.
You’re only sexy if you’re in flux.  When you hit a “normal” weight, people stop congratulating you, stop telling you you’re amazing, stop paying attention.  Is it any wonder yo-yo dieting’s a constant in life?
Is there any way we can actually get people to compliment you for who you are right now, and not just when you’ve changed significantly from last week?