Save Renee-Nicole Douceur!

If you remember my time writing Home on the Strange, then you doubtlessly remember my co-author Veronica Pare.  And right now, she’s trying to save  someone’s life:

Right now, Raytheon and the National Science Foundation are denying Renee – Nicole Douceur, the Winter Site Manager at the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station, life-saving medical treatment after a stroke she suffered last month. To avoid transporting her to an actual hospital, against theor own doctors orders, they have declared her stroke, a severe medical condition, not an emergency even though the lack of treatment endangers her vision, her mental capacity and her very life itself.

See what you can do to help (and spread the word) at SaveRenee.org.
 

Steve Jobs and Osama bin Laden

After returning home to find my Twitter-stream choked with lamentations for Steve Jobs, I made a commentary-Tweet:
“I’m betting that Steve Jobs has to be the #1 most-Tweeted about death ever. ”
To which people replied, “What about Bin Laden?”
I dunno.  I was more actively participating in Bin Laden’s death-reports, since I was at home watching the Tweet-stream fill up and commenting… But I also remember non-Laden things dispersed throughout.  At one point, I was counting to see how high I could get before I found a non-Jobs-related Tweet, and got up to nineteen.
But maybe that’s me.  Maybe I’d really like to believe that in the end, more people were touched by a man who made technology personal, a man who went out of his way to try to turn bits and bytes into art, than a guy who flew a plane into a building.  Maybe I want to believe that while Bin Laden had a huge effect globally in the way the US overreacted to his terrorism, Steve Jobs had a more positive and intimate influence by making us happy every time we picked up our shiny new toys.
I don’t have any hard stats, and I’d still be curious to see who had more related Tweets overall.  But in the end, it’d be nicer if people reacted with more dismay to the guy who touched their lives by showing them wonder instead of terror.
 

They Say Everything Fades, Like Henna, But I'm Not Sure

You know what? It’s been two months since I’ve gotten my teeth back. Two months since I can smile without worrying, kiss without fretting, chew without worrying.
And every day I’m still fucking thrilled.

Why Are There So Few Women Comics?

Andrewducker pointed me at this absolutely phenomenal piece by Bethany Black on why only 10% of stand-up comics are women.  It’s a very personal, very insightful piece that seems to tie together so many disparate thoughts I’d had about sexism and the world – triggering some thoughts of my own:
Thought #1:
“If any part of comedy is sexist, it’s the audiences.”
This is something we tend to forget on the Internet, because we hang out with our tolerant friends and gravitate towards groups that have a lot of tolerance… But where we are isn’t where most of the mainstream culture is, and we forget that at our peril.
You see that in sitcoms a lot – how can sexist, stale, chewed-up crap like Two And A Half Men be so popular?  And the answer is, “Because the audience wants that.”  For all of the horror many of us feel at the sitcom traditions of “dopey, put-upon dad, tyrannical wife,” there’s tens of millions of people out there who laugh at that crap because they feel this reflects some fundamental truth about human nature.
And how do you address that without going broke?  It’s the comic book problem: yeah, comic books are stupid and sexist.  But the core audience that buys comics is stupid and sexist.  If you alienate that audience, the entire comics industry might collapse, and there’s no guarantee that your new and enlightened and tolerant comic will attract enough people from outside the industry to make for not selling to the trolls who want submissive women with big tits.
In other words, the people paying your salary are fundamentally bent.  And changing their opinions can be done, slowly (we’re making headway in getting gay characters into comedic situations), but it’s a three-steps-forward-two-steps-back kinda thing, and you can’t just ignore them.
That gets worse when you have a lot of people who just don’t give a shit and will hand these people whatever they think they’ll buy.
Thought #2:
I remember how many of my liberal friends were aghast by the suggestion that being black might have helped Obama past a certain point in the Democratic primaries.  But while being black was certainly a hindrance in the early game, come the late game in the Democratic primary, his race had become a way of making him stand out a lot more.  And really, she sums that syndrome up:
“Because there’s fewer of us it’s a double edged sword.  If you storm it as a female comic you’re likely to be remembered more than a guy who storms it.  But the opposite is also true, if you die you’re more likely to stick in the mind than a guy who died on the same bill.  So the trick is not to let promoters see you until you’re more likely to storm it than you are to die.”
Thought #3:
“There is also the fact that male comics who are terrible will continue to perform and the open mic level longer than women who are terrible.”
You see that in Magic, too, another chronically overmaled industry.  The intense competition of Magic turns a lot of women off (as does, yes, the sexism), but one of the other things that stands out are the number of guys at FNM insisting that this deck is awesome, it beats every deck in today’s Standard gauntlet, they’re totally gonna win tonight.
And they don’t.  But this doesn’t dash their spirits.  They just brew another deck and keep going, and sometimes they do find a good deck.
I wonder what percentage of men’s dominance in any industry is due to the fact that men are, largely, culturally conditioned to think of themselves as awesome – a delusion that often hurts guys (who can’t realize why they’ve failed, and often blame external sources for blocking them from their tremendous future).
But just as often, this ignorance lets them obliviously keep going past the point that they’re terrible until they actually touch some genuine sort of talent.  At which point they begin to thrive.
It’s a weird place.  On the one hand, we don’t want to encourage talentless people, do we?  On the other hand, some significant percentage of these terrible people keep grinding until they gain talent.  So do we a) want to instill in women this feeling that NO YOU’RE SO GREAT YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE IT PAY NO ATTENTION TO REALITY, knowing that this will land a lot of women in this horrid zone where they feel like they should have made it but someone got in their way, and their entire life becomes this boiling jealousy that often erupts in strange violence, or b) try to undercut men’s confidence so they realize they’re shit when they are, thus stopping the folks who might actually get better with a lot more practice?
It’s a strange question to ask.
Anyway, it’s a phenomenally thought-provoking piece.  Go read it.
 

Letter Of The Law, Intent, And Instinct

Polyamorous relationships follow all the rules of regular relationships, but they’re faster.  They have to be.  If you’re dating other people, you discover where your boundaries and discomfort zones are a lot sooner, simply because more people are bumping into them.
And I think that there are three basic stages of any relationship when it comes to knowing where your partner’s likely to feel slighted.
There’s that early stage where you’re both letter of the law about what makes you upset.  “She can’t wear my sweater if she stays over at your house.”  “Don’t see Moneyball with him.”
If the rules are stated, you’ll follow them, but you don’t really understand the concepts behind the rules.  Which leads to trouble when it turns out that “Don’t see Moneyball with him” is really a larger subset of a concept that says, “If it’s a movie that you know I want to see, don’t see it with anyone else or I will feel hurt.”
This stage is messy, because like all emotions, the core logic underneath may not be logical at all, and the reasons why she doesn’t want your other girlfriend wearing her sweater may extend to some crazy-weirdo idea of “If I smell her scent on my things, then suddenly I feel like she’s replacing me, and that sets me off in weird ways.”
Which leads to sad, messy conflicts where you did exactly what she said in not letting her wear the sweater, but now you let your girlfriend sleep on her side of the bed, and why are we arguing?  And the truth is it’s nobody’s fault – there’s this gap of improper communication where you don’t understand the infrastructure and she’s frustrated because you broke a rule that she didn’t elucidate properly.
But she’s still hurt.  And you have to find a way to make it better.
Yet if you stay with someone long enough (and care enough about them to try to figure out where their hurt-zones are), eventually you enter into the second stage of intent.  You have a pretty good idea what will hurt your partner even if it’s not been explicitly stated in a prior communication, and work to either avoid it or discuss it in advance.
Which is where you start having strange conversations.  “Hey, I don’t know if this is gonna be an issue,” you say, “But Sarah’s just bought that BPAL you like so much.”  And then maybe Sarah wears the BPAL, maybe you have a deep conversation that addresses her fears of being replaced, but you don’t run headlong into pit of the problem.  You know where it is.  You either fill in that pit or work around it.
That leads to pretty ugly conversations with your other letter-of-the-law partners sometimes, though.  You have to explain that yes, he’s a little weird about seeing movies, and no, he has not specifically said anything about seeing The Lion King in 3D with you, but yes, you are going to check in first, and… No.  No, it’s not okay.  Can we see Dolphin Tale instead?
No, I’m not whipped, I just know him that well…
But if you stay for a long period of time, then you wind up entering the third zone, which is a kind of psychic sense about your partner’s triggers.  There are times when I’m having an email conversation with someone, and a spider-sense goes off in the back of my head where I feel like I should mention this to Gini even though there’s absolutely nothing at all on the books about this one…
…and one time out of three, turns out to be a ghost.  Gini says, “Aww, that’s nothing” and moves on.  But the other two, she gets that nodding, concerned look and says, “Yeah.  Yeah, that’s good to know.”
I know, because she does it to me.  At this point, we’ve internalized each other’s psychic maps so thoroughly that we have an instinctual knowledge of the danger zones, and have learned to trust our guidelines.
This is a good zone, because it means I can really feel safe when she goes out on a date.  I have a real, 100% trust that whatever happens, it’s not going to stomp hard on any of my insecurities by surprise.  If something comes up, I’ll get a call, either asking, “Hey, is this okay?” or “By the way, this is about to happen, be prepared” and I’m cool.
But it’s taken a long time.  And we had to break a lot of the unspoken laws to get to instinct.