Update on Appearances

The schedule has been published for CONsole Room, and it appears that I will be attending the "Intro to the Wilderness Years" panel at noon on Friday (along with Robert Smith? and Lars Pearson), the "Superheroes on TV" panel at 6 PM on Friday with Daniel Wallace, and the "Avengers: Age of Ultron" panel at 9:30 on Friday along with Daniel Wallace and Mike Lee. I look forward to all three!

Why I Would Like the Media to Please Stop Talking About Science Ever Kthanxbye

This morning, someone linked to me an article about girl toys and boy toys on Cracked.com. (I don't have the link handy, but I'm sure you can find it.) In it, one of the things they discussed was that gender bias may be inherent after all, because of "a study" that showed girl chimps playing with dolls and boy chimps playing with trucks.

This set off a little "Ah-OOGah!" siren in the back of my head, and it's one that I'd like to see ingrained into the heads of every single journalist ever. (Actually just shutting up about science ever was hyperbole.) Because the first and foremost thing to understand about science is that when "a study" shows something, that is not proof. That is not the end of the scientific process. That is the beginning.

Because anyone can run a study. There is no International Board of Scienceness that monitors the design, protocols, and data selection for a scientific experiment to ensure that the scientist got it right, and scientists are not all inherently free of bias, ideology, error, hidebound thinking, stupidity, mendacity, fraud, and general cranial-rectal interactions. A study, even one that makes it into a peer-reviewed journal, is only worth something once other scientists read it and successfully, consistently replicate its results.

In the case of our chimps with trucks study, there's a lot we don't know. We don't know how many chimps they used. We don't know how long they spent with the chimps. We don't know how diligent they were in recording their activity, or what they considered "play" to be. We don't know whether the chimps were aware they were being observed, and whether they received any kind of different treatment, consciously or unconsciously, if they "played" in the manner the researchers expected. All we know is that "a study" was run, and its results happened to confirm the scientists' gender stereotypes.

This is not a basis to report something as fact.

And more significantly, while I'm using this as an example, it is the common way that science is reported in the media. "A study today said...", the article generally starts, without commenting on who ran the study, what its research protocols were, whether there was any possibility of bias on the part of the people commissioning the study (hey, the tobacco industry just reported smoking is good for you! Wow, who could have expected?) or whether the results have been replicated anywhere else. This is like reporting that a seed was planted yesterday, and expecting dinner on the table that night.

So please, journalists everywhere--only report on "studies" whose results have been consistently replicated after being reported in peer-reviewed journals, and leave off on authoritatively citing random studies out there to make it sound like your point has been proven by SCIENCE! for a while? Kthanxbye.

Thank C'thulhu It's Friday?

Every once in a while, I have an idea that takes a long time to post to this blog mainly because to do so is to admit that I'm never going to be able to actually get it done the way I want to do it. I'm never going to be a TV professional who can get a series greenlit, especially not one that is so aggressively subversive and uncommercial as to never stand even the slightest chance of being able to stay on the air long enough to achieve the goal I have for it. Which is why I'm breaking down and blogging about it here.

What I wanted to do was a sitcom in the vein of 'Family Ties', 'Full House', 'Just the Ten of Us', 'Family Matters', 'Growing Pains'...one of those utterly saccharine family comedies that proliferated when I was a kid and teen. You know the kind of thing I mean--every issue resolved in thirty minutes, families that comedy-bicker but never say anything really mean, annoying next-door neighbor kids that are practically surrogate children, new kids added at semi-regular intervals as the old ones age out of adorability, Serious Episodes that are painfully earnest, jokes that are mostly toothless because everyone's really there to spend a half-hour with a family that's nice and pleasant and loves each other...yeah, that's the stuff.

First season would be straight-up pastiche. Adorkable older son who has Girl Problems, Wise and Loving Dad, Warm and Nurturing Mom, bratty kid sister who never admits how much she loves her brother, cute toddler, eerily smart dog, annoying neighbor boy who's stuck on the bratty sister, and all the plots are exactly the kind of low-tension stuff you'd expect from that set-up.

Second season, you'd start to see the kinds of plots that you see in series like this when the writers have gone utterly nuts from boredom and they know nobody really cares anyway. The adorkable brother finds a book of "magic spells" at a garage sale, and it turns out to really work! Casting love spells turns out to lead to all sorts of zany complications, and he eventually winds up throwing the book away and promising never to do anything that crazy again! Cue laugh track.

Except that a few episodes later, you find out that bratty little sister found the book in the trash. She starts using it to get petty revenge on the bullies at her school. She gets really good at it, in fact. She starts to rely on magic more and more as the series goes on, and her revenge gets harsher as she does so. By the end of the season, even her family finds her kind of creepy.

But in Season Three, you start rooting for her again. Because someone new has come to town. He's looking for the book. He's not letting anyone get in his way. Sister finds ways to ward the house, but he's constantly prowling, waiting. He finds the annoying boy next door and uses magic to make him into his catspaw, promising him unspecified-as-yet but probably horrible things in return. Kids start disappearing from school, and the evidence leads to Sister. She's framed for murder and has to use magic to cover it up. Season Three ends with her using magic to kill the boy next door in self-defense.

In Season Four, it ramps up more. The man seeking the book kills the mom, and the dad steals the book to use it to resurrect her. But she comes back possessed by demons, and begins working on her own dark agenda. Dad, completely unhinged by this development, refuses to believe she's changed at all and begins helping her...

And so on. Each season would transform the series, very slowly but inexorably and with total, remorseless plot logic, into a Lovecraftian horror series. The characters wouldn't change, but they would react to the world around them as it changes into something unrecognizable and utterly nightmarish.

Now honestly, I know there's no way this would get made. It's a sitcom with the explicit goal of trolling its audience until they change the channel out of sheer revulsion, pushing people as far as they can go until they run away screaming. And horror aficionados, who might appreciate the idea of turning a saccharine-sweet family into good old fashioned nightmare fuel, wouldn't even tune in. By every rational measure, it's doomed. But I have to admit I will never stop loving the idea.

Boring Meta-Post About My Upcoming Appearances

Despite the fact that I do have a few things in print, and have paid one or two electric bills with the proceeds of my writing (my favorite definition of "talented", from Stephen King: If you've made enough money from things you wrote to pay the electric bill, you've got talent), I don't think of myself as someone people come to conventions to see. But that may just be the low self-esteem talking. The point is, I will be at conventions, and if you want to stop by and say, "Hey, I read your blog/columns/RPGs, howcome you haven't updated in two weeks?" then here's where I'll be this summer.

Over May 29-31, I will be attending CONsole Room: The Twin Cities Dilemma, in Bloomington. The schedule isn't up yet, so I can't tell you exactly where to find me, but I am pretty sure I'll be on a couple of panels and I'm sure that the printed schedule will note them. This is a fun little con, in its second year, and I'm looking forward to attending it.

Over the 4th of July weekend, I'll be at CONvergence, in Edina. The con has released their schedule online, and I'm excited to say that I'll be on the "Marvel Movie Round-Up" panel on Friday at 12:30 PM, the "Cheesiest Post-Apocalypse Films" on Friday at 3:30 PM (I'm looking for suggestions on movies to bring up, feel free to drop them in the comments!), and the "Doctor Who Season Eight Round-Up" panel on Saturday at 12:30 PM. These may fill up quick, based on the subject matter, so you may want to get there early if you're interested. And, y'know, attending the con.

In any event, if I do see anyone there and they mention this post, I'll feel like I've done something useful today, so feel free to stop by and say hello! (And the short answer is, by the way, I've been blogging heavily at MGK's site. Weekly Amazing Race recaps. Oh, and Comforting Lions.)

Professor Pangloss Has No Answers Here

The Hugo debate seems to have died down a bit, probably because everyone involved has blocked everyone else's Facebook feeds and moderated each other's comments out of existence, but it's still bringing plenty of controversy. And as always when there's controversy, a peculiar sort of individual invariably raises their head to call out a battle cry that they're sure will resolve the issue: "Come on, guys. Can't we all just get along?"

To these people, the problem isn't whether or not the Puppies have done anything wrong by ginning up a slate of awards for their cronies. The problem is that people aren't willing to discuss it politely. Everyone is being so mean to each other. (There are even some people threatening physical violence, which is just never acceptable no matter who's doing it!) Everyone's making it an "Us vs Them" issue, taking a side instead of having a discussion. Nobody's trying to see the other person's point of view anymore, that's the real issue. Nobody's being understanding. Why, if both sides would stop being so gosh-darn rude and saying such nasty things to each other, or even better yet would stop pretending there's a "side" to be taken in what's really just a friendly disagreement between sci-fi neighbords, we'd probably be able to get this whole thing settled in a few days or so!

There are two big faults in this Panglossian vision of the science-fiction fandom community. The first is that it attempts to avoid taking sides by pretending that the problem is simply "extremism", and castigating (gently, oh so gently, like being smothered in spiderwebs) both groups for failing to control their extremists. Why is this a fault, though? Surely civility is a good thing, right? Threats are bad, calls for violence are bad, aggression and hostility is bad. Telling everyone to calm down and politely has to be a good thing...

But the two sides are not being equally uncivil. The Panglossians are bending over backwards to seem impartial, but they're confusing impartiality with neutrality. An impartial observer would have to conclude that David Gerrold, who is the Guest of Honor at this year's Hugos and who has been very vocal in his condemnation of the Puppies, has not made any threats and has made it clear that he does not condone those who do. Connie Willis, who made a principled stand of refusing to host the awards, is not calling for violence. George R.R. Martin might have eviscerated Larry Correia's arguments, but he certainly hasn't eviscerated Larry Correia. John Scalzi, who is according to the Puppies the architect of all that is evil, cruel, nasty and unforgiving, has made it pretty damn clear that he's too busy laughing his ass off to care about this. The vast majority of people who disagree with the Puppies are doing so fairly.

And Brad Torgersen? He's equating himself with General Lee. Ted Beale? He's talking about how it would be a rational act to pour acid into the faces of people who disagree with him. (Not about the Hugos specifically, no. That would be crazy. He's talking about people who teach women how to read.) Larry Correia is out there with his guns daring anyone who disagrees with him to come after him...admittedly, this has been his default state for the better part of a decade, but it doesn't look good here.

And despite the claims to the contrary, Larry and Brad and Teddy have a) been coordinating efforts right up until the point where it became inconvenient for Larry and Brad to have a white supremacist and misogynist hanging around their neck, at which point they tried real hard to pretend they never even heard of Ted Beale while simultaneously claiming that they'd never repudiate him Because That Would Be Wrong, and b) reached out to GamerGate, a Twitter-wielding mob primarily known at this point for sending rape and murder threats to feminists. Anyone impartial would say that the "extremists" are concentrated about 99% in one group. Trying to get by without naming names, simply saying, "Oh, a plague on both your houses, you...you EXTREMISTS, you!" is taking sides by refusing to call the situation what it is.

Which leads us to that second big fault: The Panglossians believe that if both sides toned down their rhetoric, if somehow the GamerGaters stopped issuing death threats long enough to have a friendly chat and the Puppies decided to drop Ted Beale like a hot potato and it didn't cost them 90% of their base, then we could all find common ground and resolve this in a friendly way.

But we can't. Because fundamentally, no matter how much Brad and Larry and Ted and the GamerGaters who are backing them try frantically to paper over their message with "there's too much affirmative action in science fiction right now" and "they're pandering to literary tastes instead of meat and potatoes fans who don't want 'message fiction'" and "Unlike the white males she excoriates, there is no evidence to be found anywhere on the planet that a society of NK Jemisins is capable of building an advanced civilization, or even successfully maintaining one without significant external support from those white males" (okay, that one's a little less papered over than the others)...ultimately, these are people whose end goal is the total exclusion of those who disagree with them from the community at large. These are people who won't be happy until Brianna Wu gives up her art and her activism and ceases to use the Internet as a tool for social engagement with other human beings. These are people who will not stop until either they die of old age or Nora Jemisin stops writing, speaking, and existing where they're aware of it. These are people who cannot find a middle ground or a happy medium, because they feel very strongly that noticing the existence of women and minorities is a problem for them.

You can't have a "friendly disagreement" about that. And I'm fully aware that when I don't take sides, when I decide that the real problem is that people are taking these things too personally and we should just discuss it politely as an abstract issue, what I'm really saying is that I won't try too hard to defend people I admire and respect while other people are working very hard to erase them from the society I'm a part of. When I don't take sides, I am taking a side by default, and it is the side of the people who hate.

So yep, it's Us vs Them. It's Us vs Them because the Puppies and the GamerGaters have picked a fight with a group of people who can't walk away, because their fundamental disagreement with women and minorities is that they exist and that isn't likely to change soon. We may not want to pick a side, but a lot of people had one chosen for them on the day they were born. Not picking a side is abandoning them, and I'm not willing to do that. I'll be as civil as I can, as polite as the opposition warrants, and of course I won't use or condone violence. But this is not the best of all possible worlds, and we can't fix the problem in our community by pretending it is.

It's the Obvious Sequel, In Hindsight

Follow along with me on this:

1) Bilbo, like the elves, "passed into the West" at the end of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. This was during the age of Middle-Earth, implying that it eventually came to be our Earth.

2) Tolkien, as a Briton himself, thought of Middle-Earth as the forebear of Europe. This means that if Bilbo and the elves went west on a great ocean, they eventually came to what would become the continent of North America.

3) His time as a ringbearer, while not good for his soul, did confer upon him extended life. There's no real way of knowing how much extended life would be granted; it's possible that he continued to live for centuries or even millennia.

4) His time as an adventurer granted Bilbo unique skills and talents that could, potentially, be called upon by others in need of a thief.

5) Although he's a skilled thief and an above average combatant for a hobbit his age, Bilbo would need protection if he was going to go on some sort of "mission" for the government.

This leads us to 6) Bilbo Baggins teams up with John McClane to save the United States from the last descendants of the orcs.

Summer 2016: Bruce Willis. Ian Holm. "Old Hobbits Die Hard".

...I'll start running now, shall I?

Maybe Some Flying Spaghetti Monster Greeting Cards?

I stopped at my local convenience store this morning for my daily dose of caffeine, and saw that they had a special on Mountain Dew Baja Blast and Mountain Dew Code Red that was good for today only. Now, of course, it could entirely be coincidence that they were doing specials on Mountain Dew on 4/20...I mean, they didn't also have specials on Doritos and Funyuns, so we don't have a clear link...but when combined with the Baker's Square promotion of Pi Day, I think you can at least start to make a case that all those jokey "geek holidays" we talk about on the Internet are starting to filter into mainstream culture.

Which means, of course, that they're going to be commercialized to hell and back. I'm sure that within a few years, Captain Morgan and Long John Silver's will be trying to turn 'Talk Like a Pirate Day' into their own little excuse to eat fish and chips and guzzle rum ("order in yer best pirate speak to get ten percent off! ARRRRR!") and I'm absolutely dreading what they'll do with May 4th. ("The new lightsaber earrings from Helzberg. Show her you'd betray the Jedi Order...all over again.")

(On the other hand, this will mean that we'll get 'Star Wars' fans decrying the over-commercialization of "Star Wars Day", and that's just going to be a treat for fans of irony everywhere.)

But the main thing I'm taking away from this is that if the mainstream is going to take all our joke holidays and make them into real events, complete with flowers and cards and gifts, we are going to have to up our game in terms of joke holidays. Anyone up for "Destroy the Moon Day", held every March 29th in honor of the First Annual Destroy the Moon Festival in Night Vale? Participants will shake their fist at the moon and direct their hatred at it in an attempt to destroy the moon with their minds. Or perhaps we can get Fibonacci Day, held on January 1st, 2023 and then again on January 2nd, 2035 and then again on February 3rd in 2058? Or maybe May 5th can be Zombie Apocalypse Day, and we can all give each other of Venus Fly Traps? I mean, the sky's the limit here. Let's go nuts and see what we can turn into a tradition.

Conundrums for the Ages

How exactly does one reconcile writing, "I don't wast time on the mike with a dope rhyme" in the same song as "I'm just a squirrel, tryin' ta get a nut/to move your butt/to the dance floor"? I don't think I will ever understand this.

Cognitive Dissonance and C.S. Lewis' Stable

I think I owe C.S. Lewis an apology.

Okay, that probably needs a little explanation. A while back, I decided to re-read the Narnia series. This would probably have been close to a decade ago, but it was the first time I'd read it as an adult, and I was really hit hard by how didactic and preachy the books were when I was old enough to recognize the Christianity metaphors for what they were. The books weren't all bad, don't get me wrong, but some scenes and a couple of entire books felt a little bit arrogant and off-putting in their defense of religion. (To throw out a minor example first, the ending of 'The Silver Chair' seems to convey the message that it's okay to beat up little kids if you feel like God is telling you it's the right thing to do, because God wouldn't make you want to do bad things. I don't know if that's the best message to send, is all I'm saying.)

In particular, 'The Last Battle' felt really insane and creepy. There was a lot of material in there about how religious tolerance is really just a lie told by Satan to corrupt the faithful (and this felt especially awkward when you consider that Tash drew inspiration about equally from Allah and Satan, and Lewis clearly intended his audience to conflate the two) and the whole thing ends with everyone cheering about the revelation that they all died in a horrific train accident and so did their parents.

...um, you can probably tell that this is going to be a pretty back-handed apology. Not much I can do there.

The bit I want to apologize for, though, is the bit about the dwarves. For those of you who haven't read the book recently (or who have never read the book and are busily looking it up on Wikipedia to see if I made up the bit about everyone being really excited that their parents are dead just like them) there are a group of dwarves who refuse to believe that Aslan's returned...which is theoretically good, because he hasn't and it's all a fraud. But they take it too far, at least in the opinion of Lewis, and decide they're not going to believe in anything anymore. They wind up going to Aslan's country with all of the other characters through a mystic portal in an old stable, but they don't experience it the way everyone else does. To them, it's just the grimy stable that they were locked into. Every bit of evidence they're provided is just another lie to them, because they believe deep down that there is no Aslan and no Heaven Aslan's country to go to.

And while I think that this is a pretty uncharitable view of atheism and shows Lewis in a pretty poor light (have I mentioned this is a back-handed apology yet?) it does strike me as a very useful metaphor for cognitive dissonance in general. Once you allow yourself to believe very strongly in a narrative, it really is very easy to twist and contort the facts to fit that narrative and become imprisoned in it. In reality, you're free--there are blue skies and singing birds all around you, and green grass underneath your feet--but all you can see is the walls you've built for yourself.

For one example out of literally thousands, let's look at Obamacare. By any reasonable standard, it's a success. Healthcare costs are falling, the number of uninsured is at an all time low, people all over the country are getting the lifesaving medical attention they need and the system is paying for itself. But there are a lot of people out there who have invested their emotional well-being into opposing Obamacare based on reasons that are integral to their sense of self more than on facts. When you confront these people with the numbers, they insist that the numbers must be wrong, because Obamacare is a disaster and a failure and we have to repeal it immediately to save the country. When you point out that real people will die if the law is repealed, they insist that you simply can't be right. If you press them with too many truths, they'll preserve their sense of self and their understanding of the way the world is supposed to work by deciding that you're simply not trustworthy. You are consigned to the "them", the shadowy and nefarious group that opposes right-thinking people, and everything you say is discounted as a malicious lie.

Obamacare is only one example. You can probably think of plenty yourself--people who've unfriended you when you started pointing out holes in anti-vaxxer propaganda, people who made the news for calling Sandy Hook Elementary and demanding to speak to people who were killed in the shootings, people currently analogizing themselves to North Korean political prisoners because people were mean to them on the Internet...all of them, in some way, have become prisoners of their narrative. They've closed themselves off from the truth because it conflicts with what they need to believe, and they'd rather believe a terrible lie than live a wonderful truth because they're too scared to give up what defines them. It really is an amazing metaphor, one that serves as a cautionary reminder to open yourself to reality rather than cling to a narrative. It's worth more as a metaphor than I thought it was, and for that, I owe C.S. Lewis an apology for dismissing it unfairly.

Still not buying that "Tashlan" stuff, though.

Sad Puppies and Cargo Cults

I've read a lot of arguments the last few days. I'm pretty sure that anyone who's got more than a few writers on their Twitter feed or Facebook page can say the same thing, thanks to the Sad/Rabid Puppies and their attempt to essentially build their own Hugo Awards with blackjack and hookers. They have made a lot of writers upset, and one thing you can guarantee when you get writers upset is that you're going to get some pretty interesting blog posts out of it.

They've been arguing back in turn, both with their own blog posts and with comments on the posts they disagree with, which has given me a lot of opportunities to see their reasoning in action. And it feels, well...familiar to me. I've seen it with GamerGate, with Duck Dynasty, with the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, with the Trayvon Martin shooting...it's a style of argument I'm getting to be pretty familiar with, regardless of the specific cause it's employed in support of. Let's call it "cargo cult reasoning".

First, a bit of background for those of you unfamiliar with the term. During World War II, both the Japanese and the Americans used the Melanesian Islands as a staging ground for their operations. The natives of these islands had never been in contact with any other civilization, and had no experience of modern manufacturing techniques, technology or warfare. Soldiers on both sides attempted to befriend the natives with gifts of food, clothing, medicine and other useful items right up until the end of the war. The natives, with no cultural framework that they could use to understand these events, created a religion around them. (Actually several, but I'm simplifying here for the sake of brevity.) (Yes, I know. Probably not enough.)

The religion, which has come to be known as the "cargo cult", revolved around trying to bring back the gods so that they could dispense their gifts of "cargo" to the natives. They knew that the airplane was a powerful totemic symbol to the gods, that they cleared land for it and watched the skies for its gifts, so they made their own airplanes out of wood and straw. They replicated the form in an effort to gain the power of the symbol, but they never understood what actually made it fly. They cleared airfields to give the cargo planes a place to land, they replicated the wooden crosses that they saw the soldiers pray to in the hopes that the soldiers' gods would hear them...in short, they saw something powerful and attempted to mimic in order to gain its blessings without ever once understanding what they were really looking at.

What does this have to do with the modern day? Well, there are a lot of people out there who are trying to exclude women, minorities, people with different sexual preferences and different sexual identities from what they view as their exclusive purview. Maybe it's TV, maybe it's science-fiction, maybe it's video games or weddings or pizza parlors--there are a lot of different battlegrounds on this particular front. But the fundamental intent, when you break it down, is to keep people who aren't like them from positions of authority or power in various spheres of influence.

Now, their basic argument for this is, "These people aren't like us and having to be around them makes me uncomfortable." But these days, not only is that not a winning argument, it's an instant losing argument. They can't even hint to others that this is the real reason for their behavior (in fact, some of them can't even hint it to themselves) because the vast majority of people no longer feel that this is an acceptable reason to ostracize or oppress people. So they basically have no real arguments that they can use.

And so they respond the same way the cargo cult does. They ape the form of arguments they've seen succeed in the past, without ever really understanding the underlying structure that makes them meaningful. This "cargo cult reasoning" sounds like a line of rational debate--it sounds very similar to the exact line of argument that once worked on them. But the similarity is entirely superficial, and the actual argument, well...it just doesn't fly.

Take "oppression", for example. The cargo cult debaters understand that a majority oppressing a minority is a bad thing, because every time they've tried to argue for legalized discrimination, that argument has been given in opposition. So they look at themselves, and they say, "Well, we're clearly a minority--almost nobody agrees with us. And we're clearly oppressed--there are things that we want to do that we're not being allowed to do. Therefore, we are an oppressed minority!" And so they use that argument whenever anyone tells them that they have to include women and minorities. "You're discriminating against me by forcing me to be inclusive!"

But of course, this willfully misunderstands the meaning of 'force', 'discriminate', 'minority', and 'oppress'. The underlying structure of the argument--that people should not be punished for something beyond their control like their gender, sexual preference or skin color, or for tightly-held and fundamental beliefs like one's religious identifications--is lost in a claim that sounds superficially similar, but that really means that people shouldn't be held responsible for their opinions or actions as long as they're not universally held.

Likewise, cargo cult debaters understand that it can be argued that societies establish codes and taboos and punish those that disagree with them, and that when those codes are unfair it's hard to speak up for fear of upsetting that establishment, and it takes courage and an unwavering belief in the rightness of one's cause to overcome that fear. But they omit a key part of that argument when they use it--"when those codes are unfair". Suddenly, the fewer people that agree with them, the righter they are!

The list can go on virtually forever--co-opting members of a minority to claim that they represent the minority stance (the "some of my best friends are" defense), defending extremist tactics as "fair" by pointing to extremists they disagree with who used them, claiming a "right to free speech" as a right to present their opinions or beliefs entirely unchallenged...but they all have a central commonality to them. All of them attempt to erase context from the debate in order to make their arguments seem like those of the people opposing them, in order to make them appear reasonable to people who aren't paying close attention. They look like arguments everyone supports--for freedom! Against oppression! Pro-equality! Anti-establishment! But they can be easily exposed for the sham they are simply by restoring that context. Ask yourself if it's really likely that these efforts to restore an ethical relationship between game companies and game journalists would never focus on a AAA studio. Ask yourself how 'The Avengers' can be cited as an example of the kind of "populist" movie that couldn't possibly win a Hugo when it did, in fact, win a Hugo.

In short, don't be afraid to get into the airplane and have a look around. Because the arguments that might sound good from a distance probably won't do so well up close.

The Hugo Awards

I've spent a little while wondering exactly what to say about the Hugo Award nominations. Part of me wants to do a savage, scathing, detailed, point-by-point takedown of the utter mendacity, stupidity, hypocrisy and unmitigated gall that it takes to claim that you're doing the right thing by attempting one of the most prestigious awards in your field so that an unrepentant racist, misogynist and general terrible human being stands a good chance of winning...

But the more I think about it, the more I feel like a point-by-point takedown is exactly what the Sad and Rabid Puppies are looking for. More than that, it's what they live for; they want people to engage them and their ideas in an honest, good-faith debate about their intentions and methods and what it all means for the future of science-fiction. Because that accords them a legitimacy that their actions have not earned; more importantly, it bogs their defenders down in a constant and unending treadmill of verifying and fact-checking and debating and refuting denials and proving credibility and apologizing for mistakes and correcting mistakes and re-refuting things that have already been refuted because a new denial has come out and debunking and rebunking and refuting character smears and refuting denials of character smears and and and and and and and and...

And there's no need for that. The Sad Puppies and the Rabid Puppies openly ginned up a slate of nominees who agreed with them politically, purely to show that the Hugos could be hijacked by a small group of sufficiently dedicated assholes. Everything else about this, from the "it's really all about the stories" to "Scalzi did it first" to "but my wife is black so I can't be racist" to "GamerGate didn't get involved" to "Correia declined his nomination" to "you have to read all our garbage entries before you can vote against them or you're the hypocrite here" to "voting 'No Award' just shows that you're a tool of the Man (the black, lesbian Man)" to "the real victim is us white male science fiction fans who can't get Hugos anymore" to "the rules don't explicitly say you can't do this" to "how DARE you, sir!" to every other defense, obfuscation, dodge, lie, and bad-faith argument they have advanced is all just an attempt to conceal that basic fact.

Nothing they say matters, because none of it is being argued in good faith. Their words are just an attempt to distract you from their actions. That's an insult in and of itself, because when you're talking to one of the most literate and intelligent groups of people in the world about books, the last thing you should be doing is trying to pretend that you don't know what a subtext is and that nobody should read anything into your statements. But the point is, they're never going to stop lying. They're never going to stop arguing. They're always going to try to turn everything into a rhetorical victory for their side, because their viewpoints are slowly receding into the dust of history and all they have left is empty rhetoric. If they lose, they will claim they're being oppressed. If they win, they will claim their ideas have been validated. If the rules change to prevent them from acting in bad faith again, they'll claim that they would have won if things had been "fair" (ie, if they had been able to game the rules sufficiently to win). Nothing you say will ever force the kind of introspection they'd need to undergo to understand why they're terrible people, and everyone else already knows it. So it's not worth talking about.

So don't argue with the Puppies. Just vote "No Award" in the categories they dominated, and leave them right the hell off the ballot. Because Puppies don't understand "No". They understand a newspaper to the nose.

Review: Prudence

New Gail Carriger book new Gail Carriger book new Gail Carriger book WOOOOOO!

So as you may have guessed, I was a bit excited at seeing 'Prudence', the new book (and new series) from Gail Carriger in my local bookstore. (I was even more excited that between the various discounts I got and coupons I had, I paid approximately eight dollars for it. What can I say, I'm thrifty to a fault.) This one jumps ahead some twenty-odd years and follows Rue, Alexia's shapestealing daughter, on her own series of adventures in the steampunk werewolf/vampire-founded British Empire.

And 99% of this is even better than the previous series. For one thing, we get out of Europe and see some of the consequences of Queen Victoria's use of supernaturals to ensure the perpetual dominion of Britain over the world. Rue travels to India, ostensibly in search of a new variety of tea leaf, only to get embroiled in a nasty supernatural war with a whole host of players, and questions that Rue's sheltered life of privilege never prepared her for. I'm not saying that this is all about revolution and a post-colonial examination of the inhumanity of the British Empire using literally inhuman creatures as a metaphor--not yet, at least. It's still the first book. But 'Prudence' takes the bold stand that maybe the British Empire wasn't an unalloyed good for the indigenous peoples of the Imperial territories (SARCASM ALERT!) which is more than the previous series did.

Plus there's some really cool world-building involving other supernatural species (I'd say spoilers, but when a lioness shows up within the first hundred pages, vanishes suddenly, and a mysterious woman walks out of the room it was in, what conclusions do you draw?) and as always, excellent and witty prose. Oh, and there is an adorable kitty and a charming working-class kid named Spoo who should get her own series of books about being a child laborer on a dirigible. These are also great things.

If I had one quibble, it would be that the central romantic relationship between Quesnel (a minor supporting character from the previous series, now all grown up) and Rue feels a bit like it's relying on inertia rather than chemistry--you recognize Character A, you recognize Character B, why not ship them? But the story doesn't sell me on it. Plus, after four solid books of bisexual subtext with Madame Lefoux, I'm ready for Carriger to quit beating around the bush and have an openly bi lead. I'm basically shipping Rukhmet for the rest of the series, is what I'm saying here.

That's just a quibble, though, with what was otherwise an excellent book in what I'm sure is going to be an excellent series. Huzzah for Gail Carriger!

God Dammit.

Just...god dammit.

He was too good to die. He was too goddamned good to suffer and die like this, losing everything that made him a genius bit by bit with still so much to say. He was the best writer I've ever read--and I say this as someone with a classical education, someone who's read Shakespeare and Miller and Brecht and Faulkner and Hemingway and Austen and any number of Great Authors you would care to name. He was that good. He was better. He was the best satirist since Jonathan Swift--and I don't mean "best" in the sense of funniest or wittiest, although he was that too. He was the best because he understood humanity and he understood people, the vast mass of us and the individuals, and his satire illuminated the human condition and made you a better person for reading it.

He taught me an infinite amount about the craft of writing, simply by reading him. Every book was a masterclass on the art of plotting, the art of storytelling. But more than that, he taught me the art of having something to say--his books were driven by passion, by a deep and abiding belief that you could use art to illuminate the injustices of the world, both great and small, and that illuminating them went some small way to curing them. Not enough, never enough--he knew that, which was why he kept writing right up until the end, but it was better than nothing.

His writing may never get the respect it deserves. It's fantasy, and it's funny fantasy at that, and the arbiters of quality have never really been comfortable with the idea of humor being as important as everything else in the human experience. But he deserves all the respect in the world. I never met him, but goddammit, he's the kind of man you have to mourn simply because he was the best ever and we will never see anyone his like again, and to lose him is to see the world diminished. I'm crying right now while I write this and I don't care.

And because I will never have the skill with words that he did, and I will never be able to eulogize him the way he deserves, just...goddammit.

How Has This Never Been a Series, DC?

I was thinking last night about shows set in prisons, like "Oz" and "Prison Break" and "Orange Is the New Black", and it popped into my head so quickly that I spent the next fifteen or so minutes checking to confirm that it had never been done simply because it seemed so obvious: 'Arkham Asylum'.

I mean, of course they've done things set in Arkham. Grant Morrison did the classic Arkham story, but there've been tons of mini-series and one-shots about the history of the iconic mental institution where all of Batman's villains are kept, and the video game is a classic as well. But they've never done an ongoing series, and they've never done a series that focused on Batman's enemies. It seems to me like this is just a natural, perfect extension of DC's current focus on damaged protagonists and anti-heroes and grimdark, but it's one that has the potential to actually be done well. A regular series, set in Arkham, with the Batman villains as the protagonists as they try to survive life in the worst prison in the world.

You have so many interesting characters to play with. The Penguin, who somehow contrives to get locked up in Arkham despite having no apparent mental health issues, and who no doubt maneuvers and manipulates the other inmates to get what he wants. The Joker, a terrifying force for chaos who even the staff fears. The Mad Hatter, a seemingly gentle soul in his own way but one with terrifying depths. The Riddler, an unpredictable and manic prisoner who sees everything but gives out his secrets sparingly. The Scarecrow, who takes the role of psychologist with his own cellmates. Harley Quinn, a former staffer who wound up going too deep into her understanding of madness and has no way back out. There's a huge ensemble cast with built-in name recognition and fanbases, and you can rotate the cast as needed because they'd be constantly escaping to appear in the next Batman story. (You could even show the escapes.)

I'd have to brush up on my prison dramas if I wanted to write this, but it seems like such an easy win for DC that I honestly don't understand how they haven't done it already. It'd be the best elements of a crime drama mixed with a horror story, all featuring the most famous villains in the world. A no-brainer like this should at least get a trial, dangit! Who's with me?

This Started to Sound More and More Like Fanfic as I Wrote It

I don't know if you're aware of this, but we are just a year or so away from the 20th anniversary of the Daily Show. Now, obviously the series is very much in the public eye right now, what with Jon Stewart's impending retirement, but I've been brainstorming some ideas for how to keep the buzz going for the big 2-0. To wit:

1) Bring back the old hosts. Tell me that it wouldn't be absolutely thrilling to have a big twentieth anniversary special where Craig Kilborn and Jon Stewart team up with the new host to tackle a really big news story that none of them could handle alone. There'd be tremendous potential for comedy there, as the three hosts bickered amusingly about whose style was best suited to the situation, along with some witty meta-commentary on how the show has changed over the years. (Maybe have Kilborn deliver a quip like, "You've redecorated, I don't like it"? I'm just blue-skying here.)

Maybe even, for extra dramatic effect, we could find out about a "lost" season of the series, where a comedy legend was the anchorperson? I bet they could get Bill Murray. He'd absolutely kill with the way he kept suggesting that the "new boys" were too young to do proper comedy. Of course, in order to be big enough to bring all four hosts together, you'd need...

2) Returning villains! Really, one of the things that 'The Daily Show' has always been famous for is the monsters. Now, obviously you can't bring back some of the really monstrous villains--Saddam Hussein and Moammar Khadaffi are dead, for example. But there are still a lot of good B-list villains to choose from. Dick Cheney's still out there, and George W. Bush has been laying low for a long while. Ken Starr hasn't been seen in almost fifteen years, and a lot of us still have fond memories of his time on the show. We could see a huge gathering of these classic baddies, led by maybe Bill O'Reilly or Glenn Beck? It'd be really exciting, especially if they...

3) Incorporate the spin-offs. After all, if it's the kind of crisis that forces all the incarnations of the series to work together, it's got to be big enough for the Host's old allies to return. Picture them standing side by side, Jon Stewart and Craig Kilborn and Bill Murray and (host to be named later), overmatched against the Fox News anchors, when all of a sudden Stephen Colbert shows up! And just behind him is Jon Oliver and Larry Wilmore, and Steve Carell! All the Classic Series correspondents, teaming up with the new blood to help out the Host of the Daily Show in his...er, their...hour of need. It would be breathtaking.

And then the Brigadier could show up! ...okay. Maybe not.

Why It's Going to Be Hard For the Republicans to Avoid Jeb Bush

Even though we're almost two full years away from the next Presidential election, we've already got Republicans jockeying for position in their party's not-even-close-to-happening primary season. The reasons for this are many--24-hour news networks start talking about the next election for the same reason that the NFL Network starts talking about the draft five minutes after the Superbowl ends, the sheer amount of money required these days means that you have to have your donors lined up months before actually campaigning, but a big part of it this time out is that Barack Obama isn't running again for fiddly legal reasons, and so these guys think they have a chance of winning. (Say what you will, but Obama was not a candidate that the Republican party wanted to tackle.)

So that means that there's a very crowded field, because a lot of these guys have been waiting a long time for their shot. Which means that each candidate needs to distinguish themselves from the rest of the pack, and that means they need to start campaigning early. So we've got Mike Huckabee and Scott Walker and Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin and Bobby Jindal and Chris Christie and Rand Paul and Rick Perry (did I miss any?) all trying to make headlines for themselves by visiting the primary states early and often and getting to know everybody there, and declarating their opinions all over the news like a cat marking his territory (except that you can probably distill something useful out of cat piss). And it's becoming clear to everyone concerned and most observers that Jeb Bush is slowly turning into the frontrunner.

This means, of course, that the knives are coming out for him. Because if there's one thing it's tough to be in a race this long, it's the wire-to-wire frontrunner. The earlier you emerge from the pack, the longer the other players have to drag you down. So we're already getting a lot of speeches from all concerned about how Jeb Bush is insufficiently right-wing, how he doesn't understand what motivates the modern Republican base, how he may in some way shape or form have expressed empathy for another human being in his past...you know, deal-breakers. Basically, the rest of the field is going hard at Jeb Bush, and they probably won't stop.

But in this case, I'm not sure if it's going to matter, any more than it did for Mitt Romney. Because right now, the Lovecraftian Horror Show That Is the 2016 Republican Nomination Contest (TM) has a field that consists of a bunch of head-trauma patients and Jeb Bush. And, like with Mitt Romney, we're dealing with elementary game theory here--Jeb Bush has pretty much the entire non-head-trauma vote locked up, and while that's a depressingly small percentage of the Republican vote, the head-trauma vote is split between lots of candidates. And if Jeb Bush has twenty percent of the vote, but the eight other guys only have ten percent each, he wins.

Now, if some of the other guys dropped out, then it would spell trouble for Jeb. But each of the other guys know that if they stick with it and let everyone else drop out instead, they'll get all of the head-trauma vote and beat Jeb. Which means that none of them will drop out, which means that Jeb will keep trucking along with his twenty percent, and eventually take the nomination right out from under the noses of all those "true" conservatives who would make much more entertaining horror shows in the general election.

I don't think any of this matters, because I think that America wants to see another Bush in office like Germany wants to see a Chip Hitler candidacy, and Bush is the most electable out of the Lovecraftian Horror Show That Is the 2016 Republican Nomination Contest (TM). By far. But I do think that the coming primaries are going to be some of the most vicious and nasty infighting you'll see in a long time...and coming from the Republicans, that means something.

OK, Just One More...

If you have a dirt-floor basement where you keep your dancing plants, is it a Groot cellar?

And the Hits Just Keep On Coming!

Did you hear about the mathematician who sold a new line of shoes called "Contrapositives"?

They were just Converses turned inside out.

Today's Thing I Should Be Ashamed Of

I want to createa a pulp pastiche hero named, "Bick Pentameter", and every time he announce himself to an audience there would be a long debate about why he's not speaking in Shakespearean verse.

The Five Words That Are Destroying Civilization

...are, "The customer is always right."

I have to be honest; I have never seen these words deployed in a situation where the customer is actually right. I've worked my share of retail jobs over the years, I've done a few stints in the restaurant business and I've certainly been a customer enough times to be present during a situation where someone invokes this particular piece of "wisdom". And without exception, it is used by a deplorable human being in order to bully people who are required by the responsibilities of their position to treat them politely into giving them something they don't deserve.

And it seems like my experiences are representative. There's an ongoing series, "Behind Closed Ovens", on the Gawker network that serves as a clearinghouse for stories about the restaurant industry, and they are filled with people who demand food not on the menu, complain that the well-done steak they ordered isn't sufficiently tender, tip like they've got a lock on their wallet, and generally carry themselves like maladjusted toddlers in public. And when there is the slightest resistance to their bad behavior? "Haven't you ever heard that the customer is always right?"

Perhaps at some point, in theory, this was a good idea. Maybe in some distant era, customers were routinely subjected to horrific abuse at the hands of cruel business owners, bilked and neglected and generally mistreated, until finally that legendary customer of yore insisted that they were, in fact, right! But whatever the origins of this practice, it's become a tool used by jackasses to bully people. They firmly believe that they can demand discounts, comped items, returns on goods not actually sold at the store they're going to, and treatment that goes beyond polite and even past obsequious well into dehumanizing grovelling with the threat of a bad Yelp review, and the way that they're treated on a daily basis proves them one hundred percent correct.

I think this is more than just a problem for the unfortunate individuals who have to deal with them on a daily basis; I think it actually does bad things for our society as a whole. I don't believe that you can teach people that at times, you can treat people like dirt and bully them into submission with impunity without that lesson rubbing off in other areas of behavior. The person who calls the waiter "retarded" for not leaving the pitcher of water at their table--do you really imagine that they're kind and generous in all other areas of their lives?

Frankly, I think there needs to be something of a line in the sand; yes, the customer deserves respect and consideration, but they are not "always right". Nobody is. No business can always satisfy every customer, because some customers have unreasonable expectations. And it's not rude or inconsiderate to let them know that. And the people who work at a business, whether a retail store or a restaurant or an office, are people first and foremost and deserve to be treated with the respect and dignity due to human beings. If a customer believes otherwise, then they are most definitely not "right". And if a manager or an owner believes that a good Yelp review is worth more than the dignity of their employees, then they don't deserve to have a business.

So if you find yourself prepared to use the phrase, "the customer is always right", take a step back and think about how you'd feel if you were on the other side of events. You may be surprised at what you find.