Are You Born Polyamorous?

Someone asked me whether people are born innately polyamorous, or whether people can change from monogamous inclinations to become poly. And my answer is simple:
It depends on the person.
I think some people are polyamorous, and some people aren’t. And some people think they are one way, until they discover the right set of circumstances, and then they aren’t.
So I don’t think there’s some training regimen that will make everyone gay or poly or whatnot – I think some people will never be, some people will never be anything but, and a lot of people could go one way or the other depending on where they are at the moment and what’s deemed acceptable by their neighbors.
As always, the best way to find out is to ask this individual human you’re dealing with. And to pay attention to how they react to things. If you’re lucky, maybe you’re the sort of person who makes them feel amenable to your style of -amory or -exuality.
Or maybe you’re not. In which case, move on.

Movie Reviews: Man of Steel, The Conjuring, The Purge, We're The Millers

I’m feeling rather strung out and fragile today, but I have been watching a lot of movies thanks to my flu.  And RedBox.  When you need to watch a bunch of crappy movies right away, RedBox is my drug of choice.
Man Of Steel
I like the pitch of the movie, and I like the way the movie did it, but I don’t like the movie.
No, it is too much, lemme sum up.
The pitch of the movie was, “What if we forgot the Superman legacy at all, and just treated it like a First Contact film where the aliens could all knock over cities?”  And from that perspective, Man of Steel is actually pretty insanely great.  I love the way Zac Snyder said, “No slo-mo – everything happens at Kryptonian speed” so that we could sense the terrifying blur of super-powered fighting.  I loved the disaster porn.  I loved the battle sequences.
But as a Superman film, it didn’t satisfy me.
The problem is that the movie pretends to be about humanity, but humanity is either absent or dickish.  If we take Lois out of the equation, humans are a bunch of narrow-minded thugs who should be hurled into the sun at the first available opportunity.  And then they die in record numbers, as basically when you see Metropolis collapsing there’s been no warning bell, just buildings toppling over.  It’s clear (even if not shown) that millions are dying.
And Superman’s not really concerned about them.  That’s grim and gritty, yes – he’s got Kryptonians on his gail – but it also removes a main modus operandi of Superman, which is that he’s really deepy concerned about the ordinary guy.  The movie makes stabs at that characterization, but we don’t see anyone we can root for (except arguably Lois and definitely the army guy with the knife), leaving it in this weird botch where the only humans Superman meets are ingrateful dicks, they’re dying in record numbers, and Superman’s only concerned about this small group of three people near the end.
As a first contact movie?  Sure.  But Superman’s big S carries a little heft to it, and while I’m fine with interpretations, this one didn’t gel for me.  To me, this felt like a novel that needed one or two more drafts – a few positive interactions with humans to show us why Kal-El treasured people, a few attempts to save people in mid-fight before realizing that, sadly, the best tactic was to let Metropolis crash until he could get rid of the Kryptonians.
It was a better movie than I thought it would be.  But the message was muddled, and I don’t know if Kal-El is anyone worth contrasting to Batman at this point.
The Conjuring
I usually don’t like horror movies because most horror movies suck.
Which is not to say this is different from most other movies – most dramas suck, most action movies suck, most comedies suck – but when horror movies suck, they suck in a way that sickens me.  When you treat people like walking blood bags to be popped, it makes it seem like slaughtering people is somehow a good or entertaining thing.  Which isn’t to say that there’s not a pleasure in watching awful things happen, but the sadistic bent of creating poorly-made characters only to saw their limbs off is a failure mode I’m not entertained by.
The Conjuring, however, is a nice change-of-pace.  It’s a very slow movie to start – basically, the first half an hour is establishing a pretty normal family doing the normal family stuff of moving into a house.  There’s no real Character-Establishing Moment, but rather a nice series of small interactions that makes you feel like hey, these guys are affable neighbors, complete with very realistic-feeling kids and parents.
Then creepy stuff starts happening.  This isn’t gore-porn – it’s the kind of reality-twister stuff popularized by The Ring, and when the scares come they’re far between and very memorable.  It’s the kind of film that’s not afraid to set up normality so when the world spins off its axis, we do feel terror – not squick, an entirely separate emotion, but the terror that we thought we knew the rules and holy crap we do not.
It’s a little film of modest scope, and maybe it’s a small ballpark, but goddamn if it doesn’t hit a home run.
The Purge
The Purge, on the other hand, is the bad kind of horror movie.  It has a killer concept: once a year, for twelve hours, you can commit whatever crime you want.  This cathartic killing (and implied culling of the poor) allows America to be strong the rest of the year.
Realistic?  No.  First thing people would do would be to say, “Well, if you kill your boss you’re fired,” and social implications would be back again.  And as Gini pointed out, it’s not like the “You splurge once a month!” diet works for most people in real life.
Still, there’s a compelling core here of what happens to “normal” people when they’re expected to be placed in a life-or-death situation once a year, and all the issues of class and race and family fractures, and… The Purge doesn’t really know what to do with all of that.  It swings wildly, coming close to making a statement on, say, how we treat the homeless, but then doesn’t punctuate it.  People have urges to kill almost at random, without conceptualizing the aftereffects (“I want my girlfriend’s dad to approve of our marriage, so I’ll shoot him dead in front of her!  That will win her heart!”), and then slaughter out of random greed.
What we wind up with is a disjointed Die Hard where we’re rooting for nobody in particular.  This is the kind of movie I favor remakes for; George Romero in his prime would have served this rich meat up in wondrous ways.  Surely there’s someone better suited.
We’re The Millers
It’s a reasonably funny comedy, but comedy is kind of easy to do.  It’s easy to have funny moments, as Despicable Me 2 did.  What’s hard is doing the business of hooking those funny moments up to a plot that people care about.
And We’re The Millers is like a predatory plot, feeding on our deep-seated needs.  Are we shown four loners who can’t function in life?  Well, if we throw these arbitrary personalities into a box, we want a family.  We need a family.  We crave seeing them come together to become a unit.  And I don’t know where that desire springs from, if it’s genetic or something in American culture or just our own internal loneliness leads us to crave family structures… but We’re The Millers knows this is what we crave, and shoves us in that direction where the fake family becomes the real family, and that provides a depth to what would otherwise be a pretty disjointed comedy.
This is the movie where I finally got some overdue respect for Jennifer Aniston.  I didn’t like Friends all that much (which is ironic, considering Friends has all the same flaws that now plague How I Met Your Mother), and her prissy tabloid portrayals in the wake of Brad Pitt haven’t helped.  But after seeing her in Horrible Bosses and now this, I have to admit she not only has some damn fine comedy chops, but a willingness to go with whatever works to make the scene work.  It’s the Barry Manilow moment where I may not always like the end result, but I gotta respect the ethic of the guy making it.
 

There Is No Okay In Poly

My wife and I have been happily polyamorous for over seven years now. She’s the light of my life – my “primary,” if you will – and we have tons of rules and regulations that we’ve adopted to make our relationships run smoothly.
So people email us to ask: “Hey, how do you do poly? We want to know how to do it right.”
And I ask, “So if you liked the way I dressed, would you put on my clothes?”
Of course you wouldn’t. Chances that my pants would fit you would be – well, the opposite of slim, as I’m a pudgy dude. My shirt would probably be wrong for your body type, and the bright colors might make your skin tone look sallow. My hat, so carefully chosen because I have a face like a waterfall of chins, would probably dwarf your features.
By the time we finished squeezing my boots onto you, you’d look ridiculous in an outfit that made me look dapper.
No. What you’d be better served doing is asking the hard questions of, “What about my clothing appeals to you? What tricks from my dress can we steal to adopt to your body type?” And then go from there to design an outfit that’s not going to bind you in the crotch.
Polyamory is not off-the-rack.
It is bespoke.
Look, the agreements I’ve come to with my wife have all been hand-crafted, often asymmetrical, in order to patch over the weaknesses that we have as unique people. I would never tell you that these are necessary. They’re only necessary to us.
Everything about our poly is addressing some issue that we have. Is she my primary? That’s because we’re married, and divorce is off the table, and though we do our best to not stonewall people, we feel it’s only honest to acknowledge that if there’s an emergency then we may need to pull back to focus on us. (Hasn’t happened since we started, but you never know.)
Do we have rules for who I can date? We do, but that’s because I tend to fall in love before questioning compatibility, and I’ve plunged head-first into dating women who were ultimately pretty bad for not just us, but me.
Do we have limits on how many people we can date simultaneously? We don’t, but that’s because making people feel valued in a short span of time is a strength of who we are.
All those things you see us doing? We’re doing them because they benefit us, not because there’s some sort of objective path. There’s plenty of poly relationships that have no need for a primary model, or a hierarchy at all. There’s plenty of well-balanced poly people who don’t clear their relationships with other people. There’s plenty of good poly relationships who have limits on how many people they can date before their dance card becomes full-up.
Now, in programming, there’s what’s known as “bad code smells” – coding patterns that generally indicate that someone hasn’t thought it through, indicating a design that’s going to cause problems at some point further in the process. And there are those in poly – I’m deeply suspicious of the one-penis policy, for example, as most of those relationships I’ve witnessed have been selfish men telling their partners how “free” they are to do whatever they want.
But there are doubtlessly some one-penis poly relationships that work wonderfully. Just as there are “bad code smells” that, when investigated, turn out to be the best solution for this edge case.
There’s no objectivity here. There’s only what fits your needs.
Now, if you’re asking me how I do poly because you have a similar dynamic and think you can steal a few techniques, then by God I support that. Or if you’re asking because you’re exploring the universe of options available to you, seeing what feels comfortable and what feels wrong, then hells yeah, bring the noise. Or if you’re asking because something’s changed in your relationship and you’re trying to figure out what alterations you need to make to your agreements in order to feel comfortable, fire away.
But stop asking me, “Is this okay?” There is no okay in poly. There’s only what you and your partners are comfortable with. Maybe you select something off the rack at first, but the end goal is to not emulate some other happy couple, but to become one yourself.
This is all custom-fit. Try a lot of stuff on. Look around the shop. Get some alterations, walk around the shop doing the New Shoe Shuffle.
Ultimately, it’s your body. Maybe this looks good on me. But if it doesn’t fit you, it’s useless.

Be Honest About Alternative Energy, Or Shut Up

Whenever I say that America needs good public transportation or solar power or anything that’s not gas-and-cars, I inevitably get pushback from conservatives where they go, “Solar power/trains/whatever just aren’t as efficient as cars and traditional power!”
The problem is, cars are efficient because we spend billions of dollars on them.  If we didn’t tax the crap out of everyone to pay for highway and road repair, and subsidize the oil companies, cars would probably be unaffordable.
Trains are unpopular because yes, they’re less convenient than the “drive anywhere you want” nature of cars – but they’re also unpopular because we decided to spend a significant portion of our collected funds subsidizing this mode of transportation over another.
The conversation, if we were being honest, is, “What do we feel like subsidizing?”
And Tobias Buckell points out the West Virginia spill, noting that it’s “a perfect demonstration of externalized costs.”  300,000 people are left without safe drinking water because a coal chemical spilled into the water – and who’s going to pay for that?  Not the coal companies.  No, the government will pick up that tab, meaning that we just decided to change Big Coal’s diapers.
Coal will continue to be cheap because we just saved them the cost of cleaning up their mess.
Which, if we were honest about things, I might not mind.  If we said, “Coal is such an awesome energy source, we think this is worth it to keep it inexpensive,” then great.  We’d at least have made an active decision.  Instead, we have dippy conservatives telling me, “No way, man, solar power is crap because Barack HUSSEIN Obama has to keep it propped up with government grants,” even as solar power gets cheaper and more viable every day… at least in other countries.
We’re going to subsidize some forms of energy.  That’s how these things work.  But don’t tell me that public transportation and new energy sources are crap because we have to pump money into them to make them work.  That car you’re driving?  You’re driving it on surfaces made possible by subsidies.  If you had to pay the costs for that on your own, you might like trains a lot better.
Stop pretending that the car and the gasoline are fundamentals of our society, and instead acknowledge they’re settings to be tweaked.  Even if you still come down on the side of cars, it’s closer to the truth.

Story Reviews: Ken Liu And Jeremiah Tolbert

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to read more short fiction, so as to be able to nominate for the Nebulas.  Plus, as a bonus, I read more short fiction.  Inhaling new techniques makes me better as a writer, and usually provides enjoyment.
…except when it doesn’t.  I’ve been reading the tales in Clarkesworld and Lightspeed last week, and as usual some of them didn’t do it for me.  That doesn’t make them bad stories, but it does mean I feel uncomfortable reviewing every tale I encounter, as I’ll be singling out an author to go, “This bored me so much I couldn’t get through it.”  Trust me, short story authors get few enough reviews to Google themselves to find middling reviews – and honestly, there are no wretched stories in such high-quality markets as Lightspeed and Clarkesworld, just ones that weren’t to my taste.
So instead, I’ll just review the interesting bits of the stories I read that stuck with me.  The two winners this week would be Ken Liu and Jeremiah Tolbert, which pleases me inordinately; I’m friends with both of them on Twitter.  If you’ll recall, one of the reasons I haven’t nominated for the Nebula is that I’m worried about disproportionately favoring the people I know; considering I read about six tales and only really wanted to discuss two of them, it’s nice to know that I’m following some talented people.
Anyway.
In The Dying Light, We Saw A Shape, by Jeremiah Tolbert

Others had held hands while making contact before, but not Thom. It was Lilian’s idea, he admitted later, not that it mattered whose idea it was to break taboo.
Some types had been making “group contact” with whales since those two Durango, Colorado teenagers had sex on top of one. “Lovers” were much derided by the more serious Conversationalists, so Thom thought it safer to avoid public displays of affection at a site.
But Lilian had taken his hand before he could think to stop her, and when they touched the whale’s sandpaper surface, they both gasped.

What I like in particular about this story is how it snaps a traditional writing rule in half, and efficiently: show, don’t tell.  This story is telling.  It’s almost entirely telling.
It has to be telling for the story to work.
When I wrote at Clarion, I was ribbed for writing “novels in a can,” these 8,000-word monstrosities that wanted to have the scope of novels yet were crammed, like bonsai kittens, into a short story space.  Jeremiah tells a novel-sized story here that spans decades and political movements and evolution of two characters’ mindsets, and he does it because he tells almost everything.  He tells what the characters are thinking.  He tells their history.  He tells the laws that have been passed.  There are snippets of conversation, tiny islands of real-time interaction, but so much of this is recounting past history that it’s almost a Wikipedia article of itself.
And yet it works.  The writing is sharp, and the details Jeremiah chooses to show are telling.  It’s a passive story in a way, about a passive character – I’m reminded of Robert Charles Wilson’s SPIN – but it works nonetheless, and I like it all the more for doing so.
I think “show, don’t tell” often leads writers down the primrose path of bloated stories.  Rather than saying, “He was leery of her because he’d had his heart broken before,” novice writers instead engineer a 400-word flashback scene to show the time the heart was broken, and that both adds weight to the story and pulls focus from what we need to know in the now.  This is an excellent way of showing when to tell, with liberal sprinkles of show at all the right moments, and even if I did see the ending coming, I liked it regardless.
The Clockwork Soldier, by Ken Liu

“The Clockwork Soldier”
A short interactive text adventure by Ryder
You sleep, a smile at the corners of your mouth.
In your dreams, the concentric layers of carp-scale shingles on the Palace’s roof reflect the golden light so brilliantly that visitors to Chrysanthemum know right away how the city got its name.
The Princess’s Bedroom
You open your eyes and find yourself in bed. The blanket is silky smooth and the mattress soft.
Like most rooms in the Palace, this one is lined with colorful tapestries depicting the heroic deeds of the Hegemons of the Pan-Flores League. Through a narrow slit-window high off the floor, the brilliant morning sunlight diffuses into the room, as does the chittering of birds and the smell of a thousand blooming flowers in the garden. The door to the hallway is closed right now.
Next to the bed is your clockwork soldier, Spring, standing at attention.
> examine soldier
Your faithful companion Spring has been with you as long as you can remember. He’s six feet tall and looks like a living suit of armor. You remember once opening him up when you were younger, and being amazed at the thousands upon thousands of whirling gears and ticking governors and tightly-wound springs inside.
You giggle as you remember the many adventures you’ve shared together over the years. You’ve taught Spring everything he knows, and he’s saved you from too many scrapes to count.

Ken is the unflashiest stylist ever.  It’s part of his charm.  Which is to say that Ken will do these ridiculously experimental leaps with fiction – the first story of his I ever read was studded with mathematical charts – but whenever he does something off-the-wall, one never gets the feeling that it’s just because.  There’s this lovely sense that he thought very carefully about all the other ways it could be done, desiring a specific effect, and only this effect would do.
So when I read a Ken Liu story and something weird starts to happen in the structure or style of the story, I always proceed with blissful confidence.  There’s a reason he’s doing it, and so the chaos will be rewarded with something unique.
In this case, what we have is a fairly standard story about artificial intelligence, but thanks to a time-skip and the fact that much of it is told through interactive fiction, Ken mines a very nice revelation where others might have found cliche.  The interactive fiction segments in particular are very well-done, having that sort of bolt-on Intercom feel to them – not quite purple, but definitely prone to meandering and occasionally childish.  Skipping in and out between the interactive “story” and the story gives a rhythm to it that lets it flow – I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t want to read an entire Infocom-style tale, but knowing why someone wants to solve it (which also explains why I’m not typing in commands) ensures the artificial Scheherazade doesn’t overstay its welcome.
There’s a certain playfulness here, which is appropriate for the tone.  I enjoyed this.