PayPal’s new rules remind me why I hate doing business with them in any capacity. If they’ve decided that one of their users has violated their Acceptable Use Policy, the contract allows them to deduct money directly from your account or from other accounts you control, and the contract specifies that you agree that $2500 USD is a reasonable minimum charge.
It’s amazing the bullshit this company gets away with.
Back when I was running my Kickstarter campaign,Continue reading
Me: “I need to fix my front page to it’s friendly to mobile devices.”
Wife: “Are you going to hire someone to take care of that for you?”
Me: “Nah. Whatever I do, I want to be able to take care of my site myself.”
::immediately collapses website, renders blog posts invisible, and breaks all internal links, including the ones between the book posts and the sample chapters::
So, yeah. It takes a surprisingly long time for my ftp program to download a backup copy of my blog, especially when the download inexplicably stops and restarts several times. I went to couch at 1 am last night and was back up and at my site by 5 am. As of right now, the site is largely fixed.
Special thanks go out to @PandiesSpleen who pointed me to a Broken Link Checker plugin for WordPress. It works! But it’s slow. It’s also looking at six years worth of old Randomness articles and coming up with a lot of failed connections.
Chaff. My life is full of chaff lately. Every time I try to focus on something, I get a whole of of random shit flying at me.
The worst thing, really, is that at the same time I broke all the internal links to my site, I also broke all the external links that other people have made to my individual posts. I didn’t get a lot of traffic from other blogs, but I don’t get a lot of traffic from any source.
Anyway, the work is mostly done, and I’m tired and stressed and irritable and married. My wife doesn’t deserve this crabby mood (my kid, absolutely, my wife not at all) so I’m going to read something fun or I don’t know what.
So, apparently Anne Wheaton started to receive harassment because she offered cash support to Feminist Frequency, and once the inevitable creepy tweets started, she decided to donate extra for every jerk she had to mute.
Apparently, this ridiculous threat is a copypasta meme, and that supposedly means that it’s not supposed to be taken seriously. Wheaton was supposed to recognize it, then dismiss it as a non-issue.
But really, even if she’d recognized it (I’d never heard of it before), why should she write it off? It’s coming from a (now-suspended) user account that she knows nothing about. Why’s the burden on her to make assumptions about strangers?
Yeah, a big part of the answer to that last question is “Sexism,” but other more knowledgeable people can address that better than I can. I’d rather talk about illusory internet friendships.
I’ve seen people on social media shit-mouth writers, artists, and actors as though they were old college pals who talked trash all the time. I’ve seen fans of a TV show criticize the creators in the most outrageous ways. And I’ve seen authors and other non-celebrities asking people not to glom onto them in public spaces.
Yes, the anonymity of the internet contributes to these problems, but too often I’ve seen people insisting they were not trolling, not trying to be awful. They’re just being friendly with someone they know, and were treating the person the way they treat their friends: with good-natured ribbing and straight talk. Sometimes the harassers act like casual acquaintances; not friends, but people who know you and feel they have the social capital to set you straight.
And that’s the problem: because they have someone in their social media, they think they have them in their social circle.
The thing is, it’s only friendly trash-talk if the recipient thinks it is. And while the trash-talker might have donated to cover a vet bill, or have closely followed months of complaints about a contractor, or a child’s learning disability, or a new job, the recipient might not know that person at all.
Now, to be clear, it’s unlikely that Wheaton’s harasser was simply misguided, treating her like a pal. It seems pretty obvious that he’s a straight up shit eater. The people I’m talking about are the hangers-on, who slide into her mentions telling her how she’s supposed to feel about a threat against her life. I’m also talking about the times John Scalzi has posted pictures out his hotel room windows while on book tours, then had to ask people not to track him down and stalk him in the lobby. I’m talking about the people who drove Damon Lindelof off Twitter because they didn’t like the last episode of LOST; in fact, if Lindelof’s harassers had faced, in real life, the sort of contempt they showed, over something as minor as their shoes or their haircut, they’d have been griping about it to their friends for a week. But they felt perfectly comfortable lashing out at him over a project he spent years of his life creating, which they got to watch for free.
This isn’t to say that people should never try to interact with others online–or that they should be obsequious about it–just that it’s important to understand that it’s the recipient who decides how “jokes” and criticisms will be interpreted.
Actually, that’s a useful writing tip in general, but never mind.
I wasn’t originally planning to stay up overnight to watch DAREDEVIL, but frustration with my current WIP and a 20% off deal on beer at my local supermarket seemed to suggest that the world was conspiring to make me blow off a little steam. Which I did.
There won’t be any serious spoilers in this post, but I do want to talk about it in a general way. The show does several things very well:
In the first few episodes, Foggy is charismatic as hell. His relationship with Matt is funny and real, and the delight they take in their interplay contrasts powerfully with the pain in disillusionment they feel as the story progresses. And he’s not the only one. This show is really well cast.
Obviously, D’Onofrio has the flashiest role as Wilson Fisk, the crimelord villain of the piece, and he plays it against type. Instead of the smooth and commanding figure of the comics (and the previous movie), he plays Fisk as perpetually awkward and uncomfortable, without any of the presence and charisma of movie crime bosses. It’s a weird choice; it undercuts the power and efficacy of the show’s antagonists, making them seem less threatening.
But this isn’t really about the power fantasy of overcoming a seemingly unbeatable foe. There are power fantasy elements, obviously, but the show wisely undercuts them. For instance, after a (blessedly brief) origin scene which lasts less than two minutes, the show cuts to Matt Murdoch in the confessional, talking for at least three times the length of that “origin” scene about his dad, his father’s boxing career, and the violence he had inside him. The show is much more concerned with the characters’ histories, their damage, and their vulnerabilities than they are in feats of power.
Not that there aren’t plenty of fight scenes. There are, and they’re also well done. Guys who choreograph ARROW, take note.
Early trailers had a lot of viewers complaining that Daredevil was sporting all black with a Dread Pirate Roberts mask rather than the costume from the comics, but once the costume shows up, it doesn’t look nearly as cool as that black suit did. Sorry, I’m a DD fan, too, of a sort, but the simple black costume was way more effective than the devil suit.
But what really makes this show work is the paranoia and helpless despair the characters have to endure in the face of wealth and power in a thoroughly corrupt system. No one can be trusted. No one is safe. The hero can venture out in a mask and kick the crap out of bad guys, but he takes a helluva beating doing it.
Frankly, this is the first superhero show/movie to capture a winning noir tone since BATMAN BEGINS. Everyone, heroes and villains alike, are in tenuous positions. Everyone has loved ones they fear for. Everyone has powers working against them. Everyone thinks of themselves as the hero.
The Daredevil Netflix series premieres today. If you see me online, it’s because it’s boring and I’m looking for something else to do.
Or that I’m taking a break or something.
Anyway, I’ve never binge-watched a TV series before. I’ve done a few episodes at a time, but a whole season? First attempt. I hope I hate it, for the sake of my productivity.
For a long while now, I’ve believed that tabletop rpgs were an art form in its infancy, and that there’s a potential for gaming sessions to be a kind of performance art based around collaborative improvisational narrative.
I also think that, as art, rpgs are mostly terrible and have been since their beginning. Recently, that’s begun to change.
Last Sunday night, my game group wrapped up a campaign in a fun and satisfying way (don’t worry, I won’t tell you about it[1]). How amazingly different it was from the games I played as a teenager.
I’m old enough to have played D&D before it became AD&D, and while I had fun[3], the game itself was a crude simulation of the books I loved. It was all numbers, hex paper, and moving little figures around. My friends and I moved to a new, simpler system[4] that struck us as more realistic, but we still played dungeon crawl after dungeon crawl.
After many years and a shitload of other systems, we moved to superhero games, which gave us narratives beyond “Kick down the door and murder everyone inside, then take their stuff” although it was hard to break the characters from their lawless power-gaming habits. We had fun, but a spectator would have been bored out of their minds.
And thanks to YouTube, people are playing games for spectators. I’m not going to link the ones I’ve seen, but most are as interesting as a dude telling you about a workout routine he’s thinking of doing later[5]. In short, it’s the worst art imaginable: lifeless, irrelevant, and utterly lacking in enjoyment for people outside the circle of players.
Before games become actual art, they’re going to have to become pop art[6]. They’re going to have to become as fun as pulp adventure, and at the moment, (typically) they’re not. But! Games have changed. They’re much more collaborative and focused on narrative than they were when I got into games, and I’m sure there’s someone out there, somewhere, making collaborative improvisational narrative art with the verve of the old pulps.
Which brings us to this:
Will this be the kind of pulp adventure fun that can grow into something more serious? Well, it’s combining something I really enjoyed (Thundarr) with something I hated except for the boobs (Heavy Metal), and it’s Wil Wheaton. Also: Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana. So maybe.
Of course, Wheaton has already aired a two-part gaming session, and there are lessons to be learned from that show. Have they been? I guess we’ll see[7].
What about my gaming session from last Sunday? It was art, and I sure as hell enjoyed it. However, it also was not designed to be a performance the way that Wheaton’s is, or those guys who record their sessions and post them on YouTube.
I guess the question is: What would have to change in role-playing games for them to become art that could be enjoyed by people who aren’t playing? I do have some ideas.
[1] Probably.[2]
[2] And isn’t that part of the problem? If you describe a great movie, you can make it sound wonderful. Describing a game session? OMG, get this weirdo away from me.
[3] Like most activities you do, the fun comes mostly from the people you do it with not the activity itself.
[4] The Fantasy Trip, by Metagaming, if you care
[5] “First I’m going to do five push ups, then flip over and do five crunches, then roll over for more pushups, without any pause, and I’m going to keep doing that wait where are you going…”
[6] Video games don’t count. I’m talking about tabletop now.
[7] And by “we’ll see” I mean “someone else will have to watch it and tell me how it goes.”
Posting this today, on 3/31, because if it goes up tomorrow people might think it’s a dumb prank: I’m going to get offline as much as possible for the remainder of the week.
This has always been a tough time of year for me. Spring in Seattle is the winding down of impossibly long nights and dim, gray days, and it’s always made me feel out of sorts and unhappy. Combine that with traditional post-book blues (x4), burnout from writing 30K words of blog posts, and general life/health stress, I find I’m not engaging very much online.
And what’s the point of spending that time on Twitter (or whatever) if I’m not going to respond to people?
Is it wise to be offline so soon after releasing a bunch of books? Maybe not. Maybe I should still be out in the mix, trying to soft shoe on my blog about… something I care about, I guess. Trouble is, at the moment I don’t have the energy to care, not about Clean Reader, not about Hugo Puppies, not about tv shows or their hosts.
Probably, I will check my emails and social media notifications once a day and otherwise avoid the web until Sunday. That will give me more time for writing (still working on that Great Way supplement for Fate Core), reading, walking, and generally interacting in the real world[1]. By Sunday, I should feel better. Besides, that’s when my next G+ hangout rpg session will be.
Wish me… Huh. I don’t know. Wish me productivity.
[1]Interacting with the real world not guaranteed.