A Central Truth

“Seems to me that when someone says, ‘That person thinks he’s better than me,’ what they are really saying is ‘I think that person is better than me and I don’t like feeling that way.‘”
I think she’s onto something here, especially given the emotional reactions to everything she’s noting.  A worthy read.  Check it out.

Coming To A Mall Near You: "Undercarriage"

Gini went to Teavana this weekend and almost drowned in pretention.
Teavana, if you do not know, is a store that doesn’t sell what you think it sells.  You might think it sells tea.  But what it actually purveys is an experience.  This is why the store is beautifully painted, and all the teas come in beautiful canisters, and when you read the descriptions of the sample teas available they sound like they’re a rare museum piece brought here by hand, from specially-trained Sherpas, from Mars.
It made me want to stand in the middle of the store and shout, “YOU’RE DRINKING LEAVES, PEOPLE!  LEAVES IN HOT WATER!”
Ah, but I cannot truly mock pretention, because there are things that mash my “Pretentious Douche” button hard.  Whenever I go to The Velvet Tango Room, home of exotic alcohol mixtures, I’m transformed into some snobby jerkhole who talks about top notes and his distaste for chartreuse… and I love it.  I love feeling like hundreds of people have slaved to bring me something rare and grand and noble that only We Fine Few can appreciate properly.  What I am imbibing – for a Pretentious Douche never “drinks” – is a heady blend of flavors and beauty that one must sit down to savor.  It makes me feel like a king of old, all for sixteen bucks a drink.
Done properly, I can cosplay Croesus on a George Bailey budget.
Clearly, given that Starbucks took something most of America used to view on the level of Twinkies and turned it into a four-buck-a-cup experience, one can take any drink and Experiencize it.  (One eagerly awaits the “Chill Assistance” store, wherein the various rare flavors of Kool-Aid are presented as magnificent subtleties for your tastebudding pleasure.)
The question is, is there anything we can’t Experiencize?  Is there anything humans do that we can’t apply the magic formula to?  The magic formula of:

• Take an ordinary, everyday thing;
• Create it from exotic, hard-to-find materials either shipped here from afar or grown locally and organically at great expense;
• Have copywriters describe the ordinary, everyday thing in sweeping detail, so you’re forced to pay attention to every detail and start analyzing bits about this experience you never would have before;
• Charge an assload for it, so it feels like this thing must be worth money now that you’ve paid ten bucks for it instead of fifty cents.

To verify this, I want to create a store called “Undercarriage,” a store devoted entirely to the sale of premium blends of toilet paper.  Oh, we all have our favorites already, don’t we?  Thick-ply vs thin-ply?  But what happens when you experience:

The French Curl: This rare moire watered silk blend was originally meant for Imperial usage only, famed by King Louis XIV as the only fabric smooth enough to satisfy his stylish brand of royalty.  An organza overlay gives this unparalleled cleansing material a hint of massaging purity as it excels at buffing away the clumpier waste materiel, and a hint of enfleuraged jasmine and sandalwood will leave you feeling like a monarch.  $20 per bundle, $7 for the pocketbook pack.

Think I’m kidding?  I’m pretty sure if I had the money to create a store where there were charts to find the perfect cleansing experience based on your diet, lots of references to ayurvedic medicine that mention speeding through such an essential element of life is why mankind is so stressed these days, saying that a stronger brand of cleansing material is needed to let you appreciate the sensuality of getting in touch with your body, and wham!  I’m an ass-millionaire.
You folks better hope I don’t become rich enough to start a store like this.  If I ever became rich, I’d make millions.

A Request For Psychiatric Help, Or: My Muse Is Killin' Me

I require your help because my S&M Muse hates me.
Which is to say that while others have a delicate muse that leads them gently to poetic fields covered in dew, I have a muse who grabs me by the ear and then jumps up and down on my stomach until I vomit out a story.
I’d like to tell you I have a choice in which tale I write next, but I really don’t.  My muse, subconsciously, has a knack for finding my weakest spot and forcing me to write a story that hinges on precisely that weakness.  Am I bad at characterization?  Write a story with next to no plot.  Bad at theme?  Write a story that doesn’t make any sense without the underlying theme to glue it together.  Bad at prose?  Here’s a tale that won’t work at all unless the ending is poetic and vivid.
In this case, my muse is kicking me firmly in the balls, because my weakest point overall as a writer?
My loathing of research.
I think that’s why I write fantasy and SF, because who’s to say I’m wrong?  Physics?  Oh, don’t get on me about physics, as long as the characters are compelling nobody will care if the physics are gobbledegook.  And magic’s just magic, you can’t correct me on that. I just wanna write, man, and Wikipedia’s right here, so why do I have to look anything up?
Except what I woke up with this morning was a horror novel about a psychiatric ward.  My muse wants me to do this.  And for this to work, I have to have that Stephen King-ish attention to detail where all the little bits are well-researched and fall out right.
I’m actually going to have to read books to do this one… which is where you come in.  Hopefully.
What I need are books on what it’s like as a psychiatric student in residence – preferably memoirs, so I can get not just what it’s like to learn to become a therapist/psychiatrist/psychologist who deals with patients.  I’m looking for books with not just a focus on dealing with the patients, but the experience of what it’s like to be with your fellow students as you take this journey – that pressure-cooker experience of “This is my life, starting” and the types of folks you run into along the way.  I’ve read tons of books like this about surgeons and nurses, but none in the mental health field.
So anything you can recommend to me on the topic would be good.  I’d be grateful.  Intensely grateful.  And maybe my muse would stop elbowing me in the back of the skull.

Sale! "In The Unlikely Event," To Daily Science Fiction

In a rare example of “One shot, one kill,” after boarding a plane and listening to the pre-flight announcement that cheerfully listed every terrible thing that could happen to us, I mused on how much worse a pre-space-flight announcement would be. By the end of the flight, I had a 650-word story, and within 30 days I had a sale to Daily Science Fiction.
I’m particularly pleased to be in DSF, because they’re one of the better things to happen to speculative short fiction in a while; a place that buys 260 stories a year and has a nice fat mailing list full of SF fans is a win-win on every side.  I’m not quite sure how they’re making money, but I want them to stay in business forever.
…well, actually I might have an idea on how they’re making buck.  Though I am being paid at my highest-ever per-word rate ever, a scant 641 words means that I am making $51.28 off of this sale. Flash fiction is a joy to read, but it ain’t gonna pay the bills, which means they can keep expenses down.  And provide lots of eyeballs to look at some nice flashfic.

One Of The Best Blog Entries I've Ever Written

It’s interesting: Here’s a take on why I’m not polyamorous, written five years ago, which both sums up why I am polyamorous and why Gini is the best thing in my entire life.  I’m re-reading it to quote it at someone else, but still…. every note of this resonates true, except the fact that Gini sometimes lets me build that chapel.
I don’t think I’ve ever written anything that explains my love for Gini better. Or the way I experience lovemaking.
If I had to quote just one entry of mine, I honestly think that would be it.

Christmas Greed List: Scanning….

Twice a year, I make a gigantic Greed List that catalogues everything I want this holiday/birthday season, along with the reasons I want them.  But this year will be small, since Gini’s gift to me (and mine to her) is, “Say, that $2,000 repair bill for the car?  It’s paid.”  So it’s going to be a very small Christmas.
That’s okay.  We’ll sing around the tree with the rest of the Whoville inhabitants.  It’s cool.
But I do not wish to dash the tradition, so instead I’ll scout for ideas and ask: What cool thing should I want this Christmas?  Leave me comments letting me know what sorts of neat things you think that I would covet.  As usual, go nuts.

A Case Study In Fury

Yesterday afternoon, I posted about the Speed of Rage and leaping to conclusions.  Then, later that evening, I posted this Twitter:

RT @plunderpuss: Hey everyone, please congratulate @PayPal on being a bag of DICKS to POOR KIDS at CHRISTMAS.http://bit.ly/vAujQX

It’s difficult to reconcile the two.  On the one hand, if you fire too fast, you wind up in a Siri-like conflagration of heat without substance. On the other hand, if you never fire at all, you don’t spread the word of bad things that people should know about, and potentially act/complain/generate more PR about.  So when do you know to pull that trigger?
I’d like to tell you that I know for sure.  But I’m a fuzzy logician.  This was probably the right trigger to pull.  Maybe.
Because first, I looked at who posted that link: that’d be my pal Skerry, who’s a hard-core liberal, frequently angry (in the sense that I’m frequently angry about things). Is he the sort of person who’d pass along a link without really analyzing it to see whether it’s true?  Survey says there’s a non-zero chance that he might, carried away by surface rage.  But on the other hand, being dicks to poor kids is the kind of thing I’d want to pass along if it did happen.
So then I read the entry.  It’s by Regretsy, a site I’ve generally enjoyed in the past, and they’re not notable for getting into flame wars.  This is what I think of as “The Yankovic Rule” – generally, Weird Al’s pretty chill, so when he blows up about Lady Gaga yanking him around about a cover of “Born This Way,” I assume the egregiousness of the slight is well above the beam.  And Regretsy’s been pretty stable in the past; I can’t remember a time when they seemed crazy angry at all, let alone crazy angry without substance.
Then there’s the villain: PayPal.  They’ve been bags of dicks to plenty of craftspeople, and this seems like something they’d do – sticking to their guns of policy regardless of what it says on the paper, with a bunch of idiot drones spouting company line.  I know of people who’ve had their accounts shut down for no reason, and I’ve dealt with PayPal and their suspended payments during disputes.  They’re a monolith who acts like a monolith, with most customer service interactions ending in a silent “…so where else you gonna go?”
So I opted to post the link, with the knowledge that this could be a misunderstanding.  It may be that someone at Regretsy is riotously misinterpreting and/or misquoting things, and PayPal is innocent.  But given the density of the original post (which is down at the moment, but a summary is here), I doubt they’d post that much detail if it wasn’t their last resort. So I posted the link, along with the characterization of “a bag of dicks,” in the hope that it reached critical mass enough that PayPal would be shamed into acting correctly.
In this way, I contributed to a ragefest yesterday.  Not sure I did the right thing.  Am about 93, maybe 95% sure I did.  Good enough.  But not enough to feel 100% good about myself until I know more facts.