Why I Have Pretty Pretty Princess Nails
About six months ago, I started painting my nails pretty colors. This has been a matter of some debate amongst my friends. I used to send pictures of my pretty pretty princess nails to everyone, and then a friend of mine told me, “I’m glad they make you happy, but I really don’t like your nails, so please stop sending me photos whenever you get a manicure.”
Fair enough. Not everyone has to like what I do.
I’ve also had someone on Fet go, “Well, you’re a submissive, so we’re not really compatible…” and I went, “Wait, when did I ever say I was a submissive?” Turns out that “having pretty pretty princess nails” == “Automatically submissive” to some.
Ironically, for me, my nails are a sign of confidence and strength. See, I’d been a life-long nail-biter, sometimes chewing my nails bloody. The first order of business after I’d lost all eight of my front teeth to gum disease was finding a way to bite my nails with my eye-teeth… which I did. It drove Gini nuts, but I was weak, a slave to the satisfaction of feeling my nails crunch underneath my incisors.
Then, one day, I discovered that some of my girlfriends really liked scratching. Like, deep, bloody, scratching. So in prep for a weekend away, I grew my nails out. Which was a real test of my willpower – I kept finding my fingers in my mouth, having drifted up there thanks to years of habit, and I’d have to yank them away angrily. Every ten minutes, I’d start to bite my nails, and then I’d remember that I was trying something new and I’d stop.
And lo! After forty years of biting and chewing and grazing, I managed to stop a bad habit. It was amazing. (And so was the sex. Goooo, Skinner Box!)
So when I had my long nails, it was deeply and bizarrely empowering to me. Not only were they a sign of the sadistic experimentations I was going through, but it was a sign of new-found willpower. It felt good, because here I was, a man of 42, and my nails were the sign that I was still changing my life in bold ways. I did not have to succumb to the stasis of middle age. I could quash old bad habits and find new pleasures – a fact made physically manifest whenever I went to type and discovered my nails clattering on the keyboard.
Then a girlfriend said, “Wait, you’ve never had a manicure? Oh my God, it’s luxurious.” And when I was in town, she took me to her manicurist, and I got taken straight back to my childhood. Because I realized, in that parlor….
…I could have the WORLD Magazine nails.
I wrote an essay on how eight-year-old me longed to have artwork on his fingertips, and to me that’s still one of the strongest memories of my childhood – wanting something that was perfectly reasonable, yet being told by literally everyone I knew that having colorful nails was not an option for me. The pictures of those fingernails were so detailed, it was like carrying a museum on your right hand, and why wouldn’t you want that? But that’s not what boys do.
Boys wear olive colors, and gray , and black. They wear identical suits, and if you’re lucky, you can have a different kind of shirt collar. And after that, I sort of gave up. I wore nothing but black shirts and slacks for years, and now that I look back at it it’s probably all related to being told that boys don’t get to have the fun colors.
So when Jen took me to the manicurist and I realized that I was a grown-up now, and I could dive into the damn ball-pit if I wanted, it was freeing. Intoxicating. I could be exactly what I wanted to be, and eight-year-old me did a goddamned victory lap. My nails would be as colorful as I wanted.
And it wasn’t due to rebellion. I wasn’t doing this because “Society says I must do X, so I will do Y to show them.” It was because I wanted to sport bold, tropical colors, and for the first time in a long time I was able to just do what I wanted. (Which is an entirely different thing than rebelling, though it looks pretty much the same from the outside.)
I call them my pretty pretty princess nails, which is a bit of rebellion – I know boys aren’t supposed to have these things, so I might as well embrace the genderfloomp and take pride in it. To me, they’re a sign of who I’ve become – which is, to say, an older fatter man who nevertheless has the evolutionary potential of a teenager. The nails reflect a changing sexuality, a greater willpower, a willingness to reinvestigate old, closed-off avenue. Who I am now isn’t who I was five years ago, and what does that mean for who I might be a decade from now? The future is vibrating with all sorts of awesome, and I see that awesome reflected in my shiny shiny nails.
Now, the nails also carry a sadness in them, because I recognize that they’re a significant sign of privilege. I work at home, so I don’t have to worry about the office. I’m a middle-aged white dude in a respectable income bracket in a liberal area of Ohio, so I can get away with this shit; if I was a teenaged kid in Arkansas or a senior citizen in a nursing home, this would all be off the table. This is all something I get to do because society has decided that I’m a person who should be able to buck the system and not get his ass beat for it, which I recognize.
(That’s what you do with privilege, man. Recognize. And work when you can to change the system. All it takes.)
The thing is, part of the issue is that in this society, women are the only ones who should decorate themselves. And you see men increasingly want to peacock a little, and when they do, they are so fucking terrified. Take a look at the descriptions behind this new nail polish for men – oh, sorry, nail armor. (Or “War Paint.”) They have to cloak this urge to have colors in all sorts of misguided and cancerous masculinity – men who beat other men use this! It’s a long tradition among warriors! Our colors are chrome and steel and military, so people won’t fucking mock you!
It’s sad, because the truth is, you’re gonna get mocked anyway. Just admit that you want to be pretty. You want to have flair. You want to stand out. And that’s all cool, man. But when you have to cloak this not feminine, but human desire to decorate yourself in such negations as “No self respecting man should ever have to buy cotton balls” (and then pay $3.95 for something that should cost two bucks tops down at CVS), then you have failed.
Be what you wanna be. Not everyone likes my nails. I do.
I’m cool with that.
Why I Don't Respond To (Some / Too Many) Comments
A friend of mine seemed distressed by the fact that I usually don’t reply to comments on Facebook. Or LiveJournal. Or Twitter. And I started to reply, explaining to her why most of my comments go unreplied-to, and why that doesn’t mean that I don’t appreciate comments (I read every one, sometimes obsessively), and after I’d doped it all out in my head, I figured I mise well deconstruct it here.
Thing is, I do reply to an awful lot of comments, or so it seems when I get ’round to them. But the problem is that, for me to reply, I feel like I have to have something of interest to say back. And while I get some beautiful comments, very personal and outpouring, by the time they’re done I don’t have anything to add to them. They’re complete thoughts, intriguing – but I always feel that if I’m going to leave a comment, it should contribute to the discussion rather than just being the empty space of a “…Yeah.”
(This applies everywhere, by the way. It’s why I rarely comment on other people’s blogs, either; I’ll link to multitudes of them, praising them highly, but you’ll note I hardly ever comment on the blog posts I paean.)
What triggers my “that’s interesting enough that I have something to say back” is a mystery to me, just as I’m never quite sure what thought is going to inspire a blog entry, and like the blog entries, it waxes and wanes according to some mysterious inner tide. Sometimes I’m inspired and everything seems like a dialogue, other times I feel like I’m just wasting space on the Internet.
I know, I know, people like acknowledgement. So if a comment is particularly clever, I’ll leave a “Well said” if I think my readers should note it. (Or I’ll like it on Facebook.) But for me, a page full of “Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks. Thanks.” feels kind of empty, the sort of thing you do for the sake of politeness than out of interest. And if I did that, then my blog would turn into even more of a chore than it is, and I’d write less.
And it would mean less, I think. I was absolutely thrilled the day that Joe Lansdale retweeted me, until I doped out that he seemingly retweets anyone who mentions him for any reason, presumably on the advice of a publicist. Joe’s one of my favorite authors, but when he responds to me, I want it to be because I’ve said something that caught his eye, not just because he rubber-stamps everything. And so when I see him replying to people, I don’t think he’s entertained by us, I think he’s just following some arcane law of social media. I don’t judge Joe for his choices, but I do know I don’t want to be that guy.
Sadly, and I know this is a failing, the best way to get me to respond is to be wrong. A comment that’s dunderheaded in a sincere way will get me talking back to you, which some folks have told me just encourages the argumentative. That’s true, because I’m argumentative. I like debate. I like new facts. I like getting in there. But I also do like quiet reflection, and it’d be nice to provide incentives for more of them, but again, I don’t know what to say that wouldn’t ultimately be meaningless.
Thing is, your comments entertain me mightily. I read every last one, sometimes to Gini if they’re funny enough. And I’d say I probably respond to 20, maybe 25% of them. But I get a lot of them, and many lie fallow because I think I owe it to my audience to be just as entertaining back to them as they were to me.
So you might not get a response. Sorry about that, Hoss. But like Frasier, I’m listening.
A Failure Of Duotrope, A Failure of Their Audience: Thoughts By Someone Who's Been There
Duotrope.com was the site I always recommended for new writers. Looking to find a market for your story? Duotrope had the most up-to-date listings of which magazines would pay for your stories, how long you could expect to wait for a reply, and all in a solid, searchable package. It was free, though of course they bugged you to donate. And it was awesome.
Then they started charging for subscriptions, and the Internet went berserk.
Thing is, I’ve actually helmed at least one free-to-play transition: StarCityGames.com Premium. When SCG opened, all of our strategy articles detailing how to play Magic: the Gathering were free. We paid our writers, but we made it up by selling cards from our online store. No problem. But as the years went by and we started attracting bigger writers, our article costs skyrocketed – as did our traffic, which meant we had to pay more for bandwidth and larger servers. Eventually, the articles were such a net loss that they were cutting into our card profits to the point where even accounting for the increased traffic the articles brought, we couldn’t afford to keep them.
So we had no choice but to render select articles Premium – you could only read them if you’d paid for a subscription. Which was hellish. But we did several things that Duotrope did not do, which helped:
1) Our costs were low.
I don’t know how Duotrope came up with $50 a year, but that sounds like too much. When we started, it was $30 a year, and we were paying out hundreds a week for forty written pieces. If Duotrope is spending hundreds of dollars weekly to keep its article database updated, it’s doing something drastically wrong.
Yet even if that $50 is a legitimate cost, it’s still a terrible price point. For a Magic player, who already spends hundreds of dollars on new sets and PTQs and road trips and card sleeves, paying $30 (or $50) to win some of those games is a legitimate investment. But I’d wager 85% of Duotrope’s audience won’t make $50 off of story sales in a given year; selling stories is tough, yo. So with a $50 price point, what you’re saying to your audience is, “Your first story sale of the year, if you make one? Hand the money over to us.” That’s a bad message.
What I’m pretty sure happened was that Duotrope did some bad math: Only 10% of our audience donates voluntarily, we need $x to stay alive, so divide $x by 10% of our audience and that’s our target goal. Whereas, as I’ll explain, that’s not going to be the case if you do it right.
2) We added features right away, so it felt as much as possible like an upgrade.
We made our bestsellers list available instantly, so Premium members got one new feature that nobody else got, and we added some hot new writers right away so you’d see extra value. It still stung, and we got a lot of negative backlash, but we also had a lot of people who trusted us that Premium would equal “you get more for your dollar,” and not “paying for what we got for free last week.”
Duotrope has made it feel punitive by saying, “You have to pay to get what you got.” Which is poor timing. They just added some new features, a cleaner search bar; why didn’t they wait and make those Premium-only searches? Why not put in a bunch of user-requested upgrades and make them all Premium so that users would feel the site was on an upward trajectory?
(And seriously? You don’t get newsletters unless you pay at Duotrope? Do you realize how easily you can monetize ads in a targeted newsletter, guys?)
3) We minimized the removal of old features.
Yes, some fan-favorite authors were now behind a paywall… but we left some veeeery popular authors on the Free side, even though we knew people would pay for them, because we wanted people to feel like “Coming here for free” was still something worthwhile. Duotrope, however, is removing most of the functionality that people liked for free, making it nearly useless to those who don’t pay. So how are people going to know how great your engine is unless you can show it off, right?
4) We framed it as “We had no other choice, we wrestled with it mightily, we are sorry, but this is the way it had to be.”
Look at our initial essay on Premium, where Pete explains in detail all of our other options that we struggled with. There’s literally ten paragraphs on our business squeeze before we get to the bad news. Now, a lot of people didn’t believe us, but all that detail helped folks to understand what a bad position we were in. (Which, and I’m being honest, we were.)
Duotrope’s essay feels curt and punitive. “Hey, you didn’t pay, so we have to do this.” For a site for writers, they utilized none of the narrative talent to create a sympathetic story. They could have explained how they got that $50 price point, and why lower prices wouldn’t work, and how they’ll keep the site quality up going forward since a lot of the work is done by paid volunteers… but they didn’t, and now they’re paying the price for that.
5) We accentuated the lower cost. Duotrope’s article states “Monthly subscriptions will cost USD $5 per month and annual subscriptions will cost USD $50 per year.” Bad writing, guys. You want to keep that monthly cost in line, so it should have been something like, “Access to our database is a mere $5 a month, or if you commit to an annual subscription, you save at only $4.16 a month ($50 total!)!”
Twitter was ablaze with DUOTROPE COSTS $50 A YEAR NOW. Reading Twitter, you’d think that there was no cheaper option. They really should have emphasized the monthly costs.
6) We figured that more people would sign up when they had to. People generally won’t pay when something is free – 10% of their audience was actually pretty generous, all things considered. But once the wall went up and you had to pay, more people would pay. So that 10% was probably underestimating by quite a titch. (Our conversion numbers were well above what we thought they’d be.)
So what you wind up with is Duotrope taking a lot of flack, and people going to free sites like Ralan.com (which I can’t stand, personally), and I find that sad. I think that they definitely needed to do this, as these sites are usually losses for someone, but they should have thought it through more – both in terms of the business model and the reaction of the Internet. As someone who’s witnessed a successful transition in this realm, they handled it badly. I hope they pull it off, because I like them. I intend to pay.
But that said….
If you never paid anything to Duotrope, and you could have, shut your fucking mouth.
The title of this essay is “A Failure Of Duotrope, A Failure of Their Audience,” and the failure of the audience is that the Internet inevitably wants everything for free, and never wants to pay for anything, and then gets outraged when it’s asked to pay. And if you’ve been using their site for free despite their years of begging you for cash, and couldn’t even bother to tip ’em a $5 at some point, take all of your complaints and shove ’em where the sun doesn’t shine. You’re the reason they had to go to a pay-for-play model – because you valued their service at free.
The typical response is, “Oh, they can make it up on ad revenue!” Yeah. Take your seventy page hits a week and see how much they get, particularly if you never clicked through. Your contributions to their cash are next to zero. You took their hard work for granted, and walked away whistling. You were a net leech on their work, whether you like it or not.
The lesson in this is, “If you use a service that you like, and they’re asking you to pay for it, pay them.” Doesn’t have to be much. Like I said, if all you can afford is $5, then pay them $5. If you’re flat broke and would pay them if you could, well, I’ll count those intentions as good. But the world does not run on free labor, and at some point labors of love fail to pay for the labors of the stomach.
In the future, to avoid this sort of thing, give when you can. Stop assuming that “free” means “a buffet for you” and start thinking, “How can I reward these people for their work?” Maybe you pay it back by volunteering at their site, or telling about it to all your rich friends, or whatever. But stop dining and dashing, and start helping the world be a better place by rewarding those who do good things.
If you liked Duotrope the way it was and you didn’t help ’em out, well, you’ve removed all of your right to complain about how things did turn out. Recognize that. Move on.
Presenting….The 2012 Annual Greed List!
The time has come for my Annual Greed List – the large (and, yes, uncut) list of things I desire for Christmas in 2012. Why do I do this? If you’re really interested, here’s a brief history of the Greed List.
The briefer version, however, is that I think “What you want” is a reflection of “Who you are” at this moment – your music, your hobbies, your fandoms, all combine to say something about who you are as a person (and, as the Greed List has aged, something about how technology is intersecting with society). And while I guess I could just make a big ol’ Amazon Wishlist and rank it and link it, why bother? I want you to know who I am in this moment, and so I not only list what I want, but explain why I want it.
So here it is. Here’s who I am this year. Ordered in descending level of desire.
Batman: The Animated Series: Season 1, Season 2, Season 3, and Season 4 ($20 apiece, maybe?)
Normally, the top-list item for my Greed List is something unfeasibly expensive, which my family may or may not band together to purchase – past choices have been “A king-sized bed,” “An ION Rock Band Drum Kit,” or something similarly $500-and-uppish. This year’s #1 is surprisingly affordable. Why?
Well, partially it’s because I’ve given up all hope on Netflix Streaming getting them – which is, of course, a guarantee that Netflix Streaming will add them the moment I ask for them. (It worked for six season’s worth of Mythbusters on DVD.)
(As a side note, it’s funny how Netflix has made the Greed List more expensive – time was, I’d have a lot of DVDs/VHS tapes that anyone could get for Christmas-y prices. Then Netflix came along, and obliterated my chronic inability to return tapes on time – at one point, I had $300 in over-charges from a Blockbuster – so instead of purchasing DVDs to see a movie, I’d Netflix them. Then streaming came along and made it so that I could view a large selection of movies on demand. Then Spotify let me do the same for music. Now, if I want a movie, it’s generally so big I won’t wait until Christmas, like the Avengers, so the low-end stuff has shifted off the list, leaving pricey ugly stuff. Which is bad, I know, but that’s #firstworldproblems for you.)
Anyway, the other part is that I adore the Paul Dini comics, but have never seen the Animated Series – of which there are four – and they strike me as being precisely the kind of low-wattage entertainment that will pass the time while I’m working and exercising. I mean, not to dismiss comics or animation, but if I concentrate for a few moments to suss out a bug in a function, I won’t be lost forever, and it moves quickly enough to take the pain off my legs when I’m exercising. These are, by many peoples’ lights, the best Batman cartoons ever made, and I would love them.
They are currently $20, but I don’t know if Amazon is having a sale. Maybe they are. Maybe they should be purchased stat.
A Treadmill Desk ($450)
Part of the reason this isn’t #1 is that we’re having problems with our treadmill. But I am a pudgepot, and trying to get his wind back, and one of the quickest ways to burn calories subtly is to put your treadmill at, say, one mile and hour and slooowly walk for three hours a day while you’re catching up on email. For me, I’d probably use it while I wrote, which would help a lot.
I’m worried that we spend all of this money and then can’t get our treadmill fixed, in which case we have a desk that does nada. We have our second repairman coming out on Monday. If that doesn’t work, we may need a third. It’s all under warranty, but it’s convincing the warrantors that this isn’t our local electrical fluctuations, and so I’m relatively confident. Though it’s a bunch of change.
But it would help me wander about.
A Fire Poi Starting Kit ($110)
“I am so glad you are not learning to eat fire!” my dad gushed. “I mean, I’m sorry you can’t breathe fire because of your bad teeth. But at least I know you won’t be burning yourself!”
…sorry, dad.
Anyway, I would like to learn how to spin fire poi. My friend JFargo left me behind a starter kit using socks, but two other fire poi spinners have looked at his hand-made grips and expressed concern that they’re distinctive, which is to say that skills learned on them may not translate to actual, you know, fire. Dunno if that’s true. But it’s Christmas, and we can be a little frivolous, and why not just get me a full fire poi kit? You don’t have to have it on fire to try. And then I can get up to speed, and eventually try it with the flame, and then go up like the Hindenburg.
In case you’re curious, the kit I want is double-loop leather, black chain (always black!), and Large. If you’re more in the know about fire poi, feel free to contact me.
Straight Razor Shaving Kit (…$???)
…sorry, dad.
Like every other red-blooded male who saw Skyfall, I thought, “Well, shit, why aren’t I shaving with a straight razor?” It seems hideously dangerous. Then again, I shaved for years using an electric razor because the disposables seemed hideously dangerous, and then one day I tried it and holy shit, look at how smooth my skin is. And I’ve watched my barber shave me with his straight razor any number of times. So it can’t kill me.
(He says, thinking of that scene in Eastern Promises.)
The problem is that I’m not sure what the best way to do this is. The straight razor kits seem really overpriced on Amazon, and they’re not well reviewed because they’re not sharp. (From experience in other areas, I can tell you that the dullness seems like a feature, but you’re more likely to catch your skin and cut it with a dulled edge.) So I think what I want is a Dovo razor of some sort, and a brush, and shaving soap, but probably not all in one kit – just three separate items. I think I’d want a Dovo razor (so I don’t have to strop – these have exchangeable blades), and if you get those then you have to get a pack of Derby blades (the sharp and dangerous ones). Then a shaving brush, and old-fashioned shaving cream.
What could go wrong?
Hideous Hawaiian Shirts ($30)
Seriously, any time you can pick me up an XL shirt in the most hideous of colors, I’ll be happy. It goes with my pretty pretty princess nails and my new hats and my fabulous boots.
Far Cry 3, for X-Box ($60)
This is yet another first-person shooter, but what appeals to me about it is a) the supposedly beautiful graphics, and b) the fact that you’re just an average dude seeking revenge. Most games start you off as a badass soldier, who for some reason has just a knife and a pistol. In this case, your brother was the soldier, who got shot, and you’re wandering around the island getting into random gunfights in the hope of getting good enough at warfare that you have a chance of rescuing the rest of your family from the crazed warlords.
I like that plotline. So I’ll try this game.
The Troupe, by Robert Jackson Bennett ($13)
I read a lot of books by author friends. I usually enjoy them, but it takes a bit of work to get me over the hump and into becoming a fan. In this case, Robert’s first book, Mr. Shivers, was this delicious Bradburyesque tour through Americana dust bowl, and this looks to be more of the same. I would like to read this on the plane back home from visiting my Mom in California, as my father’s gift of Stephen King’s 11/22/63 helped while away the five-hour trip back to Cleveland, thus inspiring a delightful tradition I hope continues.
X-Com: Enemy Unknown, for X-Box ($60)
There are many who think that I am a smart man. Those people should watch me play strategy games. Holy God, put me in charge of a Civilization and everyone in that town is going to die horribly. Even on easy.
So why do I want what is well-known to be the most punishing strategy game for the X-Box, where often even if you play perfectly, sometimes luck will fuck you out of victory? Where it’s brutal, and every soldier counts, and losing two men in a mission is enough to cause a restart?
Well, because I often enjoy the mental challenge, even if I’m clearly not up to it. And because if I get it, I can write in the hyphen on the box with a Magic Marker, because the original game this was based on was called X-Com, and this one is technically named “Xcom,” and that bothers the shit out of my anal-retentive little heart.
Weighted Companion Cube Fuzzy Dice ($20)
If you’ve never played Portal, you won’t get the joke. But it’s a good joke. And these should be swinging off of our car. It would make me happy.
Dark Knight Rises: Special Blu-Ray Edition ($20)
Let’s be honest: the only reason this isn’t higher is because I’m going to buy it for myself if you don’t. I’m a sadly slavish Christopher Nolan fan, considering him to be the modern-day Alfred Hitchcock – and while, yes, his films are often cold emotionally aside from grim men doing grim things, I get off on that. And I thought Dark Knight Rises was a spectacular and audacious film for a superhero flick, with a truly terrifying villain. (In other news, thanks to my Dad for giving us his spare Blu-Ray player so we can view stuff like this without giving money to the evil Blu-Ray manufacturers! I won’t pay extra to watch extras you should be stuffing into your normal DVDs!)
Superfolks, by Robert Mayer ($13)
Theoretically, this is the book that my favorite comic author Alan Moore stole all of his best ideas from – you can, some have accused, see the ideas of Watchmen, Killing Joke, and Swamp Thing embedded in an obscure novel few have read but Alan used to rave about back in the day. Do I know if those accusations are true? No. But I’ve also heard it’s a good novel on its own, and I’d like to see the controversy for myself.
Police Squad!: The Complete Series ($13)
Also known as “Netflix Streaming is going to start offering this the moment I get it in my hot little hands,” this was the TV series – tragically cancelled before its time – that inspired the very successful Naked Gun comedy series, which is probably so old that most of you haven’t heard of it by now. Lordy, I’m old. In any case, Naked Gun was often a bundle of recycled Police Squad! gags, and I adored the show even more than the movies. Sadly, my VHS tapes won’t play on anything around here without some considerable tech-patching, so time to upgrade.
Bond 50: 23 Movies On Blu-Ray ($300, $129)
I saw this when it was, apparently, on sale at $129, but now it’s the normal price. Had I known! I might have gone over the top. The issue is that my daughter Erin is a confirmed James Bond addict – you should have heard her squealing for Skyfall, Skyfall, OMG OMG IT’S MORE BOND – and she’s threatening to disown me because I’ve seen Goldfinger, and well, probably have seen some of the other Connery movies but don’t remember them.
For $130, should you have it lying around, it’d be worth educating myself. For $300? Well, if you have it lying around and don’t feel like getting me the more-desired things above, then great. But I doubt you will. But who knows? I mean, it’s Christmas, amiright?