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

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

One Of The Best Blog Entries I've Ever Written

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

Christmas Greed List: Scanning….

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

A Case Study In Fury

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

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

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

Oh, Siri, You Uptight Prude: The Speed Of Rage

So Siri, the iPhone’s voice-recognition search engine, is anti-choice.  Asking it to find an abortion clinic finds nothing, showing that Apple has baked in a pro-life bias right into the iPhone.
…or maybe this displays another bias built right into the Internet.
See, as it turns out, searching for abortion clinics via a sketchy search engine just doesn’t produce consistent results, partially because Planned Parenthood doesn’t advertise “ABORTIONS: BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE!” on the front page of their website, and partially because, well, Siri’s searching is mightily impressive in some ways but really quite lacking in many other ways.  And it’s not like, you know, Apple products haven’t ever been lacking in their first-generation incarnations.
The “scandal,” however, highlights the problems with people on the goddamned Internet.
First off, what happens with every Internet blow-up is that people know the reasons why.  Could it be that abortion clinics don’t usually tend to use the word “abortion” prominently when describing their services, and that Siri might overlook it?  Could it be that Siri has a lot of problems with a lot of searches, and that abortion is merely one of many things it’s bad at finding this early on?
Of course not.  SIRI HAS BEEN SPECIFICALLY DESIGNED TO FILTER OUT ABORTION RIGHTS AND CONTRACEPTIVES.  Which means, of course, that Apple are a bunch of right-wing Nazis who’ve set out to purposely knock the knees out from women’s power by rendering them helpless to find the very tools that would give them power over their own bodies.  Because, you know how Apple is just seething with Rush Limbaugh fans.
But that’s what happens on the net: one person jumps to a large conclusion, and another person reads their Tweet and retweets it, and next thing you know it’s “APPLE WANTS TO FORCE-BREED ALL WOMEN, FILM AT 11.”
The second problem here?  The arrogance with which people demand an answer.  The Internet is a big place, and there are a lot of things, but there’s this expectation that Apple should be a quivering tuning fork eagerly combing every reference to them like some egotistic movie star, waiting to respond to every conspiracy theory, no matter how crazy.  I saw Tweets within 48 hours decrying that APPLE HASN’T RESPONDED, THIS PROVES THEY’RE PRO-LIFERS AT HEART TRYING TO CONCEAL THE TRUTH.
Well, no, pal, it may just be that your cries haven’t reached critical mass yet…. Or that they have heard, but they have to talk to the Siri team to figure out what the problem is so that they can respond accurately, and as it turns out gathering correct information may not be doable at your whim.
But that’s the Internet for you: I WANT A FULLY-FLESHED OUT, THOROUGH, SATISFYING RESPONSE TO A COMPLICATED TECHNICAL QUESTION TWO MINUTES AFTER I’VE BECOME AWARE OF IT, OR YOU’RE A TERRIBLE PERSON.
(And yes, maybe Apple does need to hire a bunch of people to monitor for crazy-ass conspiracy brushfires starting up, just because it looks bad if they take, oh, a weekend to formulate an answer.  But anyone who’s worked in retail will tell you that customers are often greedy dumbasses who get bent out of shape over the most moronic things, and yes you try to satisfy them… But that doesn’t mean they’re not touchy douchebags who would make the world better by being decent human beings.)
Then there’s the third problem, which is WHY ISN’T APPLE TELLING US THE INTIMATE DETAILS OF SIRI?  IF THEY ONLY OPENED UP THEIR SOURCE CODE TO US, WE’D KNOW THE TRUTH.  WHAT DO THEY HAVE TO HIDE?  Oh, I can’t see a reason in the world why Apple might not want to explain the intimate workings of their #1 new feature.  It’s certainly not like Google or Bing or all the other phone manufacturers in the world would be eager to find what Apple is doing right and try to steal it in a heartbeat.  But no, the fact that they have not produced a 20-page PDF with diagrams to explain how this accident happens, instead marking it off quite legitimately as a bug they hope to improve, is proof that Apple are secretive and awful.
Dude.  You’re kind of awful.  I dig that this sort of herd mentality is going to crop up from time to time, but instantly assuming the worst possible motivations and then demanding a full explanation instantly approaches insanity.  It’s a literal shit-storm, a tornado of outrage that’s kicked up out of someone noticing something weird, and it just makes it harder to be civil or rational, and more importantly if we have this level of furor over everything then it’s harder to sort out the genuine problems.  Of which there are, you know, many.
I’m not saying not to investigate.  But allow for other options, like, “I dunno, man, does anyone have any problems with other drugs or other types of businesses?” that would let people come to saner conclusions.  Don’t let Apple off the hook, but do recognize that if someone collared you on the street out of the blue and roared, “SO WHY HAVE YOU NOT ANSWERED MY QUESTION ON THAT RACIST SHIRT OF YOURS?” you might not only be stunned by the question, but might have to take a while to not just ask what the fuck is happening and see why people think your shirt is insulting, then carefully formulate a proper answer on why your plaid shirt is causing an uproar rather than aggravate this angry guy even further.
The problem is that the Internet puts people in such close proximity with the things they love, they come to believe that everything has become a tool of theirs, existing only to provide them with answers on their schedule.  And it’s good to realize that hey, maybe they’re human, maybe there are some genuine screw-ups here, let’s try to give the benefit of the doubt before lowering that rage-hammer.