Trying New Things, Or: Demonstrating My Vast Hatred Of Plants

The nice thing about getting older is that you get to keep trying new things, if you want.  I’m well known for my crazy Hawaiian shirt and my hats and my fabulous pretty pretty princess nails, but those are only things I’ve started doing in the last five years. If you’d known me when I was twenty, I’d be famous for dressing only in black (I Neil Gaimanned before Neil Gaiman) and carrying a chair around with me everywhere I went.
So I figure, why not keep trying new things and seeing what fits?
One thing that’s been nice is Woodworking Wednesdays, a tradition I’m starting with Eric Meyer – on Wednesdays, Eric comes over and we attempt to build things with our limited knowledge.  We’re both in intellectual, conceptual professions – web programmers and writers – so making something concrete with our hands is satisfying.
We’re not good at this woodworking, Lord no.  Last night, we spent about an hour making test cuts with a router to try to figure out how the damn thing worked, then spent another ninety minutes endlessly measuring, clamping, and cutting to rout dado grooves for three shelves.  It’s a slow process where we debate approaches, experiment, and then wonder oh Christ, we fucked up this cut by a quarter of an inch, how do we fix that?
But that’s the interesting thing: woodworking skill is largely about fixing your errors. You can measure all you want, but wood is an organic material and tools (at least at the casual woodworking level we’re willing to spend at) are imperfect. The truly skilled woodworker isn’t the one who makes no mistakes, she’s the one who can adjust to the flow of inevitable problems.
And there’s something heartening about that, I think. You’re gonna fuck up no matter how you plan. It’s how you recover that matters.


Then I visited my sweetie Raven down in Kentucky, and, well, kinda fell in love with Kentucky. Or if not Kentucky, I fell in love with bourbon, because going on a bourbon tour will make you at least a little swoony for new beverages.
But her friends are heavily into bourbon and cigars, and I didn’t know much about cigars, so when SB and DK brought me to a fine cigar store, we bought a bunch of cigars to go with the scandalous amounts of bourbon we purchased:

(Before you tell me this is not a scandalous amount of bourbon, this is about 80% of the bourbon we tried in Kentucky, and god damn, the Blanton’s is off the chain.)

Anyway, so we didn’t actually smoke cigars in Kentucky, because we were having so much fun sitting around a fire and talking, so we brought some home with us.  And I had, fortunately, bought a book on “How to smoke cigars” which was highly entertaining because it was referencing a recent hurricane that had destroyed Cuba’s cigar crops, and I realized that hurricane was in the mid-90s, and this book was twenty years old.
But the funny thing is this:
Gini can’t read manuals.
I thought it was roleplaying, where I’d eagerly devour the rulebook and Gini would go, “What do I roll?” and flail around in the mechanics of the game, but as it turns out, Gini basically has a mental block when it comes to reading manuals of any sort.  And so I enjoyed myself mightily in the tub reading all about how to smoke this damn cigar properly, the type of lighter you needed and how to light it properly (you don’t puff madly, you toast around the rim and let it burn), and how to smoke it (about one firm set of puffs every minute or so) and how most cigars turn foul about halfway down.
And so we went out in our garage and got out the bourbon and tried to smoke, and it was surprisingly enjoyable:


I thought I’d like the big dark cigar, but it turned out I liked the lighter Perdomo reserve taste. Gini, however, loved the big dark cigar in her mouth (and get your cheap jokes in now, folks). Cigar smoking is the sort of thing I can’t do too often, as my cardiologist will swing by and kill me, but it’s not as lung-damaging as you’d think – you’re not inhaling the smoke, just swirling it around in your mouth.
I don’t like the taste of cigarettes, but this was different – deeper, a little lusher, more satisfying. Also, because you’re just touching the surface, it’s not all in your throat, it’s just on the tongue and then you breathe it out; I find cigarettes pretty much invade my lungs, whereas this was a visitor in the parlor I could kick out whenever I pleased.
And it was relaxing. When you smoke a cigar, you really can’t do anything else – you just sit there, waiting calmly for the next puff, drinking in between.
Thing was, the cigar actually did turn, and holy God could we taste the difference – we got halfway down, and the smoke turned dragon-dung foul, and I’m so glad I read the manual, because otherwise I might have thought this was the cigar experience.
Again, another life’s lesson: you don’t have to smoke everything down to the stub. Even though you paid well for that stogie, it’s best to walk away when the experience sours.
I’m sufficiently a lightweight that I got a total cigar high – the rest of the evening, I was a little giddy. All the next day I was unable to taste things properly – there was a subtle slick on my tongue that neither mouthwash nor alcohol nor milk was able to remove – but then it went away and we were back to normal.
I could see us doing this once a week, when the weather is nice. It was surprisingly pleasant, sitting out with my wife and just shooting the breeze.
Plus, you know, I get to look like an old-fashioned mogul out on vacation with my ridiculous hat and shirt and now this silly cigar:

Polyamory's Not Your Vacation Villa

The problem with polyamory is that it’s often sold like a vacation getaway. “CAN’T GET YOUR KINKY SEX AT HOME?” the advertisements thunder. “THEN COME AWAY TO FANTABULOUS POLYAMORYVILLE, WHERE YOU CAN FIND THE BEATINGS OF YOUR DREAMS!”
It doesn’t have to be kinky sex, of course, and often it’s not. Sometimes the poly-billboards are as innocuous as “Hey, you like going out to flower shows, and your wife doesn’t! So let’s sweep you off to this Relationship Getaway, where you sniff roses with a person who likes the things your partner doesn’t!”
And you’ll see that Vacation Villa model of polyamory a lot: you’re a dynamic fun person with many interests, and no one person can fulfill all those interests, amiright? So when your partner gives the big shrug to doing something fun with you, find someone else who is interested! And fuck them! Fuck the shit out of ’em and Do The Thing!
Problem is, that often backfires subtly in poly models that have a primary center to them.
While on the surface, it seems logical – “Hey, my partner doesn’t like going to Magic tournaments, why drag them along?” – what happens in practice is that, well, you treat the new partners like WHOO VACATIONTIME LET’S POP SOME MARGARITAS.
Like any vacation, it’s great at first. You’ve got these new partners to go have all the exciting adventures your old partner didn’t want to do! He didn’t want to windsurf? Hey, you’ve got a windsurfer in your boudoir! She doesn’t want to try fireplay? You’ve got someone to stoke the flames with!
But slowly, if you’re not careful, you start thinking that Old Partner is the one you do Old Things with, and New Partners are where you do all your growth. It doesn’t help that Old Partner may be reluctant to try the new things that you’re evolving into, and so what you get at home is a stammering hesitance – “I dunno if I want to go on a road trip” – whereas new partners are all like “FUCK YEAH LET’S DO THE ROAD TRIP THING.”
Sometimes, it’s not even a refusal. It’s just a natural, stupid uncertainty. I know Gini and I have had these incredibly stupid moments where, fifteen minutes after we’ve decided we’re going to settle in for the evening and watch CLONE WARS reruns, someone comes running into the house with an amazing party we could attend with fireworks and ponies and otters.
And stupidly, we have a surly reaction: “We had plans! They weren’t good plans, but… now we have to put on a hat. Man, that hat seems like effort…”
Usually we shrug it off, because what we realize is that for a lot of people, “Change” takes a bit to acclimate to. There are those free spirits of you out there who are up for any adventure even if they’re flipping you out of bed at four in the morning – but for most of us, you gotta give us a minute to wipe the sleep out of our eyes.
So what happens starts to look like this:
“Hey, I wanna fly to Hawaii on a kite-string, whaddaya think?”
“Huh. I’m not sure if – ”
“Okay, fine, g’bye!” And they’re off sailing to foreign lands.
Eventually, you forget to even ask your partner, because you know what That Partner does, and that’s not the fun stuff, and so you quietly compartmentalize your life into WHEE WITH FUN PEOPLE and Oh Yeah, That Guy, and….
…it doesn’t work out so well. Your lives splinter apart, because you’re no longer sharing experiences. You evolve in different directions, because in the worst of cases they may even stop telling you what they love.
And when their love mutates and you don’t even understand what’s getting them off, it’s hard to keep it together.
What you gotta remember is that in a quote-unquote “primary” poly model, it’s perfectly fine to go off and do other stuff – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise! But never forget to give your partner the right of refusal. (Not the first right of refusal – that way leads to the abuse of quote-unquote “secondaries” – but a right.) If you decide you wanna take up target-shooting, or nipple torture, or the Paleo diet, ask them if they wanna come along. Give them space to decide, too, time to work past that initial reticence of STRANGE AND SCARY and possibly into lands of “Okay, so…”
And if it turns out you really really love something, even if they refused doing it with you the first time, tell ’em how important this is becoming to you, and ask ’em to give it a shot. The goal’s not to rope them into being joined at the hip with you – if they try target-shooting and it leaves ’em cold, great – but rather, to say, “This is a window to what I love right now. You may not enjoy it the same way I do, but can you see it? I want you to know me, even the parts you don’t fathom.”
Because the real danger with poly-as-vacation is that you start treating your old partner like the job. You condition yourself that the good times happen elsewhere. And when you start thinking of your partner as the thing you do in between the happy times, well, you’re doomed.
Any good relationship involves a set of shared experiences. You don’t have to – and in fact, probably shouldn’t be – doing everything together. But you should let ’em know what you’re doing, and what jazzes you, and even though they may say no ninety-nine times, maybe that hundredth time they’ll come along and you’ll find something neither of you thought you could love doing, and deepen the relationship instead of shrugging it off.
That ancient sage Snoopy once said that “Dogs don’t eat dinner, but we like to be asked.” And that act of asking can be powerful in letting your partner know that they’re welcome, and loved, and even if they sit on the couch while you’re off whapping each other with foam swords in a medieval reenactment, they’re still a part of your good times.
Even if those good times are as simple as “When I get home, I am gonna have so much to tell them.”

So What Was It Like To Read WATCHMEN Back In 1986, In Real Time?

There are currently thousands of kids who have no idea what it was like to wait years for the next Harry Potter installment.  They just arrived, conveniently, in a world where all seven books were waiting for them.  If they’re a fast reader, during a summer without much to do, they might mow through all of Harry’s adventures in less than a week.
Those of you who lived through the Harry Potter series, though, know that the experience of reading a series is changed significantly when you have to wait  years to find out what happens next.  It’s a far more interactive experience, because you can only get so far in the story before your mind whirls with theories on what might happen next.  You re-read the existing chapters, searching for clues.  You form deep and doomed attachment to relationships in the book, wanting, needing these two people to end up as friends, knowing that the next installment might shatter all your dreams.
Watchmen has been a unified graphic novel now for damn near thirty years.  So it’s easy to forget at that one point, people were waiting months for the next issue to arrive at the comics shop, dissecting individual issues, unsure how it was all going to end.
Thing is, Watchmen was an entirely different beast from Harry Potter, as the fandom for Watchmen took place largely in a void.  Harry Potter’s fandom was magnified by the Internet, where fans could gather in a virtual group to exchange theories, encourage each other to write fanfic; all we had in 1986 was BBSes, which weren’t nearly the same.
Basically, you’d talk over Watchmen if you had some comic-toting friends, but finding people as into it as you were was difficult at best.  Fandoms were isolated islands: I don’t doubt some people had social groups where they all got together and dissected every panel, but I had my friend John and a couple of buddies down at the comic shop, and then my fandom died.
Then there was the issue of availability.  If you wanted to get into Watchmen, there were no collected graphic novels, and back issues were hard to find.  I lent out Watchmen a lot, particularly as the series went on, because people would get into it around issue #9, but because it was a fine seller they couldn’t find issue #4 in the racks.
Some people had a bizarre take on Watchmen, simply because they couldn’t find issue #1, #3, or #6, so they actually didn’t know what had happened in the beginning and tried to fill in gaps.  Considering how continuity-heavy Watchmen was, that meant some people were really struggling to make sense of it.
Yet what I remember about reading the series in real time is disjointed:

• The EC Comics homages (with the pirate ship) were largely considered irritating, because we wanted to find out what the hell was going on with Dan and Rorschach and Doctor Manhattan, and here was this stupid comicky storyline elbowing out plot we wanted to read.  It was as if you were desperate to find out what happened to Harry Potter, and instead was this cut-rate pastiche of Gilderoy Lockhart’s adventures taking up fifty pages in every book.

• Because of that, it was widely speculated (“widely,” in this case, meaning “in the Norwalk/Westport area I lived in”) that there would be some meta-crossover, where the comic-pirate world would turn out to be another “real” world like Watchmen, because why the hell would Alan Moore spend so much time on this thing if it wasn’t plot significant?  (As it turned out, the answer was most likely “Because he only plotted six issues and needed filler.”  In retrospect I’ve come to like the EC comics storyline more, as it’s very thematically correct, but when you’re mad to find out What Happens then “thematically” really clogs up the pipeline.)

• The reveal of Rorschach was, interestingly enough, largely met with a nod.  None of us saw it coming (though, as with everything in Watchmen, the clues were there), but though I’m told other isolated groups of fandom reacted poorly to their grim-and-gritty power hero being a homeless fanatic, we thought it quite fitting.  We also, correctly, saw Rorschach’s true nature as a critique of fandom – we noted our own poverty and dedication, and filled in the details.

• The thing that shocked us the most, over time, was Rorschach’s humanity.  If you look at the early comics, imagine reading repeatedly for basically seven months (there were mild production delays, IIRC) and seeing Rorschach as this cold, callous element of destruction. He destroys his old enemy, albeit accidentally.  He even destroys his psychologist.  So when that first moment came when he apologized to Dan, offering the handshake awkwardly, that was like a bomb going off for us. The idea that Rorschach could evolve made the series feel like it could go anywhere – you may note that of all the characters, Rorschach is the only one whose non-superhero name I don’t innately recall – and so when he started to change, we felt completely at sea.

• The truly weird thing in retrospect is how strong we believed the female characters were in Watchmen.  And this is what I call “Star Trek Syndrome,” where you have a work of fiction that’s groundbreaking and progressive at the time, and then as society evolves the original show becomes an embarrassment.  The Original Star Trek, with Captain Kirk, was actually really progressive – they let women on the bridge, and occasionally let them be doctors! – yet as the years passed and “women on the bridge” became an expected thing, all the other bits of Kirk slapping them on the ass and seducing all of them made him look like a troglodyte.  Likewise, you see that with Joss Whedon – Joss is getting so much flak for being “not a feminist” these days, but when Buffy the Vampire Slayer was made, it really was feminist-progressive for television.  It’s just that twenty years later, we’ve got higher standards.

• So yeah, in retrospect, the “rape turns into love” plotlines are embarrassing in Watchmen, and Laurie’s ham-handed mother issues don’t hold up too well, but at the time having a woman characterized as equally as a man was so shocking to a comics industry that usually had women as walking plot devices.  Hell, having a complex relationship with her mother – a scene where they just talked! – was pretty groundbreaking to a bunch of nerds who were used to having women catfighting a la Lois Lane and Lana Lang.  And even now, Laurie’s being front-and-center as someone whose opinion matters, where in a very real sense the whole plotline involves Manhattan convincing her of the correctness of his vision and vice versa, is something you don’t see terribly often in comics. Even if Laurie doesn’t make her argument explicitly, convincing Jon by the sheer nature of her raw emotions.

• The fan theories only really exploded once it was revealed that Adrian was the main villain – though we were all wildly incorrect as to how that would work.  Before Adrian, we were convinced the series was en route to a team-up, where they’d find the villain and punch him (which was, to be fair, the standard plotline in comics before that, and again, to be fair, this was the stunted fan theories of a couple of comics nerds in a sedate town).

• Even back then, we also bitched extensively about Adrian’s super-crappy password and lack of biometrics.

• After Adrian was revealed as the villain, however, we were unsure.  We correctly saw the nuclear destruction out there, and were half-convinced the missiles would fly with a nuclear holocaust. We thought he might be brainwashing politicians, as there was some evidence of his manipulating the media well.  We knew about the alien biology, yet didn’t understand what that meant.  We trusted that Alan Moore would bring it through.

• Okay, and you can bitch about your cliffhangers -but after reading for almost a year, “I did it thirty-five minutes ago”  remains one of the most shocking plot twists I’ve ever seen anywhere, in any media. It’s good in the book; imagine waiting for eleven months to get there, convinced the protagonists were gonna save the day through luck and spunk, then realizing that a) they had failed, and b) we’d have to wait several weeks to find out what happened afterwards. Jesus.

• And we felt like, well, he kinda didn’t. The annihilation of New York was shocking, and watching all the side characters we’d come to love get destroyed had the emotional effect, but I remember feeling at the time like, “That’s it?  That’s his plan?”  And it’s kind of like the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi in that we liked everything surrounding that – his motivations, the worldwide reactions, the fact that his plan actually succeeded – but the actual destruction itself felt like, really? Alien flops on top of Manhattan? Fine. I didn’t watch the movie, but when I found out they were changing that aspect, I remember nodding my head and going, Yeah, that’s probably for the best.

•  At the time, we felt like Laurie’s “Let’s fuck” was really simplified, and not quite as beautiful as Moore meant it to be.  I thought that was because, maybe, I didn’t have a lot of experience with sex, or funerals, and with time I’d come to understand the fullness of it.  And nope; I know what he’s getting at with “Tandoori to go,” but the scene still feels a little creepy to me, Mister Alt-Sex Polyamory dude.  Maybe some love it.

• We did, however, agree that the ambiguity of the ending kicked ass, and I think part of the reason Watchmen continued to have such an effect for years after is that you could always ask any group of nerds “So did he pick up the right package? Should he pick up the right package?” and get a spirited debate going.

Thing is, for all its flaws, Watchmen is deep in my writing-DNA. It hit me when I was growing up, and to this day when I plot I wish I had the clockwork finesse of Alan Moore.  Afterwards, I went on to read Swamp Thing (and if you think back issues for Watchmen were hard to find, imagine getting forty issues of a not-particularly-popular series that only had the first seven issues in graphic novel form), and that really turned me on to what good prose in comics could do.
I know, objectively, Watchmen has flaws. Realistically, however, internally, to me, it’s flawless, such an overwhelming cauldron of ideas that even its errors somehow attain magnificence.  And a large part of that is due to reading and rereading it obsessively, one month at a time, as the issues came out.
If you had your personal experience back in the day, reading it before the graphic novel, I’d love to hear them.

Two Pieces Of Beautiful Art, And A Chance To Meet Me!

1)  Because my Mad Manicurist Ashley staunchly refuses to create her own web page, I’ve devoted a page on my site to all of the fantastic nail art she’s done for me.  If you wanna see everything from Ms. Pac-Man nails to Flex-themed nails to The Amazing Spider-Nails, well, Ashley has pretty much “nailed” all of them.
(Ah HA ha ha.)
Anyway, it’s a pretty astounding gallery of hand-painted nail art, so go look.
2)  Remember Tormented Artist, who did that amazing Flex fan art a few weeks ago?  Well, he’s inked it!  Here’s the updated version as it wings its way to a fully-colorized piece:

3) And a reminder: Next Tuesday, the most excellent Side Quest Nerd Bar‘s June Book Club Selection is my Breaking-Bad-By-Way-Of-Scott-Pilgrim book Flex.  I will be attending, and giving away a metric ton of free books from Angry Robot.  They’re really good books. You want them. And the Side Quest has really good drinks. You want them. And they’ll be discussing my book Flex, which I’m told is really good, but even if it’s not, well, that’s still two out of three awesome things, so you should totally show up.

How To Make Largely Correct, But Rage-Inducing, Assumptions

So there’s this great Buzzfeed article about Spotify: “How Hip-Hop Conquered Streaming.”
In it, we learn that this current generation of kids does not understand purchasing music at all – which maps to watching my various Godchildren interact with music.  When they want to listen to a song, they go to YouTube.  For them, music is something you get by going to the Internet.
And hip-hop, the music that appeals to the youngest of demographics, reflects that change.  Spotify’s a service that has an extremely young audience – their core listeners tend to be 18-24, right in the pocket of hip-hop’s most engaged audience.   So when it comes to the intersection of streaming + hip-hop, Spotify multiplies and dominates.
Spotify is, largely, a young person’s phenomenon.  Here’s the most fascinating bit, to my mind:

According to a study by GMI Market Research provided to BuzzFeed News, the average age of users of major music platforms is as follows: Spotify, 28; Pandora, 32; iTunes, 34; SiriusXM, 42; terrestrial radio, 43.

(I love the way “terrestrial radio” sounded all space-aged to me until I realized it meant “Car radio.”)
But basically, there’s a huge age gap in who Spotify appeals to. The average age of users is 28, but the Buzzfeed article indicates that the most engaged Spotify users are teens and college kids.  And that doesn’t even map the audience sizes of each: I’d be willing to bet that if you’re over 40 (and particularly if you’re not hooked into the Internet beyond checking Facebook), the chances you’ve heard of Spotify are comparatively slim, at least compared to the widespread brand-name recognition of iTunes and Sirius Radio.
So Spotify has a marketing challenge.
So on Saturday, Spotify made a (now deleted) Tweet that said:

Ahead of #MothersDay, how would you explain Spotify to your Mom? There could be free Spotify Premium in it for her!

…And the cries of #Sexist and #Ageist rang out.
Sexist? Maybe. I mean, it’s an advertisement for Mother’s Day, so it’s going to reference women, and maybe it inadvertently stomps on the societal (and erroneous) undertone that “Women aren’t good at technology.” It may also have been that they would have clumsily asked you to explain Spotify to Dad if Father’s Day had come up first on the calendar, so I can’t say definitively.
But ageist? Absolutely! This Tweet assumes that mothers who are old enough to have given birth to people following Spotify on Twitter don’t know how Spotify works.
The issue here: statistically speaking, they are probably correct.
On average, a woman has her first kid in her mid-to-late twenties.  Adding in the average age of a Spotify user, that means the average mother is going to be roughly fifty-five – twice as old as the average Spotify user, and hence a statistical outlier.  (Being charitable, and assuming this Tweet was aimed at teens, maybe we’re talking about mothers in their mid-to-late forties.  Still above the curve.)  They may understand streaming in some vague sense, but not in the concrete sense that they can stream music in their car, with their cell phone, on a fairly crappy connection.
Spotify’s in a bind here, because they’re trying to avoid stating their real reason for this Tweet.  A more accurate version would be:

Ahead of #MothersDay, how would you sell Spotify to your Mom?

But then people would go “Crap, I don’t want to be a shill for Spotify” and tune out. (Not that the original Tweet was a mastery of the form, but it at least had some plausible denial.)
There’s more tone-clueful ways to dance around this issue – “Make a Mother’s Day Playlist for your mom, send it to her, get her to download this software she doesn’t use, and maybe she’ll win free Premium!” – but none of that gets around the central problem that this “Ageist” assumption is, well, probably likely true.
Not true for everyone.   But a chronic problem people have is in conflating “Well, I know someone!” with “This statistical data is wrong!”  I mean, there was that new study that shows that on average, people stop listening to new music at the age of 33.  And as we speak, I have the Spotify top 50 station open, because I like to know what the kids are listening to these days, and so I listen to a lot of new music.  (Here’s my favorite song of late, BTdubs.)
I could easily go, “Hey, I’m 45 and I listen to new music! That study is crap! My experience disproves it!”
Whereas the truth is that my experience neither proves nor disproves that study.  Yes, I listen to new music, but the study isn’t saying no one listens to new music after 33, just that most people do not.  Yet if I’m the sort of person who does, chances are good I’m going to get insulted by that accusation.
My saying, “My behavior reflects the behavior of everyone in my demographic!” is not particularly logical… but lots of people do it.
Likewise, yes, there are plenty of older people who do listen to Spotify, and understand perfectly how it works.  I’m 45, and the reason I listen to all that new music is because Spotify makes it easy for me.  Yet I can acknowledge that even as I do listen, if you were to take 100 45-year-old men and say, “So do you listen to Spotify?” the answer would largely be “No,” with a considerable portion of 45-year-old men answering, “What’s Spotify?”
And people can get angry at that assumption, but that doesn’t make the challenge facing Spotify any less true.  If these studies are accurate (I cannot attest that any of them are, but I’d bet dimes to dollars Spotify believes they’re accurate), then most mothers – and most people who are in their late forties to fifties – may not understand streaming, and certainly do not listen to Spotify.
And they have to find a way to sneak around that truth, because God forbid they imply anyone is ignorant.
Implying someone’s ignorant in something they’re informed of thumbs their rage button quicker than anything.
Which is why I’m not saying that Spotify was right to say what it did.  It was a tone-deaf Tweet that pissed off users, which is never a good thing.  But what I’m saying is that the tone-deaf Tweet pissed off users not necessarily because it was inaccurate as a whole, but because it got taken specifically.  If the study is true, then what happened here was that the outliers got really mad because they hated the way this assumption was incorrect about their personal experiences, even if that assumption may have been largely accurate for people in their age group.
So Spotify – and every other company on the planet – is now engaged in this weird dance where they know the truth, but dare not speak it. Yes, most 20-year-olds don’t vote, but if we say that we’ll piss off the ones who do. Yes, most people don’t know how Obamacare really affects them, but if we say that we’ll piss off the ones who do. (And always, always, we’ll piss off anyone who is actually ignorant, merely by stating the fact of their ignorance.)
How do we skitter around this ugly truth to inform the ignorant without annoying the people who are actually informed?
I wish I knew.  All I know is that I’m 45, and outside many demographics. I’m a weirdo polyamorous young-listening hypersocial introvert writer, and I see ads that assume bad things of me all the time.
Yet despite knowing what a demographic weirdo I am, I still get mad when corporations make awful assumptions about what I like in life.  Because while there are many things I’m an outlier on, “Being immune to anger when I’m miscategorized” isn’t one of them.
The embarrassing truth is, I’m okay with Spotify miscategorizing me, but only because I take it as a quiet proof that I’m living my life as I want to live it: Hey, these other older people haven’t a clue, but you are hip and young!  If there was an advertisement that suggested men my age and weight were sexually unattractive, even if that was statistically correct, I’d be furious.
Just like the mothers who have just been told that their technological skills are insufficient are furious.
So maybe I’m wrong to be angry when Budweiser assumes I love sports and hate clothes shopping simply because I’m a guy – a majority of American men fit that profile, and they’re merely playing the odds. But Budweiser’s job isn’t to correct me; it’s to sell their products and services, and that means ensuring that “correcting my bad assumptions” isn’t a wise move on their point.  If I’m angry for irrational reasons, far better to tiptoe around that rage and find some other, more clever, way to sell me things.  Or just pretend they didn’t hear my complaints, because hey, there are plenty of men who do love sports and hate shopping, and why not focus on this profitable cluster of dudebros where all the money lies?
This is why advertisements don’t make the world better.  They just find ways to sneak around our irrationalities or to marginalize us. Because that’s what sells.

Oh Yeah: Flex Audiobook Rights Sold! WHO WANTS TO LISTEN TO DONUTS?

I mentioned it on Twitter, but then promptly forgot to note it here for posterity:
The audiobook rights for Flex have been sold to Audible.com, my favorite books-on-audio site.
I have no details other than this. No, I don’t know who’s reading it. No, I don’t know when it’ll be out (though I hope it’s out by this summer).  No, I don’t know how much it’ll cost.
All I know is that it’s a two-book deal for both Flex and The Flux (Flex’s sequel, which drops in October), and someone will be tasked with reading that impossible prologue with all of the parenthesized numbers, and I’m as excited as hell to see how it sounds once it’s all out on digital.
So yay! Thanks for buying, and liking, Flex enough that they’re doing the audio production!

One Of My Favorite Stories, And Now You Can Read It Too: "Shoebox Heaven"

Yesterday, on Twitter, Alyssa Wong asked this:

Writers: do you play favorites with your own stories? I’m dying to know.

— Alyssa Wong (@crashwong) May 26, 2015

To which I replied:

@crashwong I do. The relationship between them and the popularity among readers is tenuous at best.
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) May 26, 2015

…which is a weird thing about writing that nobody outside the creative arenas quite gets: Popularity does not equal personal satisfaction. History is rife with musicians whose most popular song they wrote was one they couldn’t stand, and full of authors whose “best book” fell to dust while their toss-off novel went on to win awards.
Me, I’m lucky; as a short story writer, there’s two I’m known for, and I like them both. “Run,” Bakri Says is a great sci-fi time-travel story, and Sauerkraut Station (which I’m writing a sequel to) is a pretty decent riff on “Little House on the Prairie” in the stars.
But if I had to pick my top two stories, “Bakri” would be one of them, and “Shoebox Heaven” would be the other. Shoebox Heaven was printed in Andromeda Spaceways magazine, and then disappeared. Couldn’t get it reprinted, couldn’t get it put on one of the audio podcasts for a performance.  It’s like my hipster story in that occasionally my deep fans reference it, but mostly it’s vanished.
Yet when Alyssa asked about it yesterday, it occurred to me that I hadn’t actually reprinted that story on my site, even though the rights had reverted to me. And why not? It resonates with me.  I’m proud of it. It should be on the web somewhere.
So without further ado, I present to you: “Shoebox Heaven.” The story of a boy who flies to Heaven to rescue his dead cat.
I hope you like it as much as I do.