I Don't Need To Protect My Favorite Shows

I think Emily Asher-Perrin is the best blogger on Tor.com right now, and she wrote an article called It’s Time To Get Over Firefly.  Which basically states that Firefly is overrated because a) it ended before it had a chance to disappoint us, and b) some of the impending plotlines and themes were a little troubling (specifically, the overarching themes of Southern Restoration and the appropriation of Asian themes without actual Asian people).
This caused a hubbub in certain circles.  “How dare she say Firefly is overrated!” people cried, rallying the flags, and I’m all like What, hey, why? 
I don’t get that defensiveness over fandom.  I never have.
I love old-school Doctor Who.  But the episodes are padded, the special effects are laughable, and the acting is often wooden.  So what?  I can acknowledge those flaws and not have them bother me.  If I waited for a show to be perfect on every level before I could enjoy it, then I’d never watch a damn thing.
And even if I thought the acting on old-school Who was wonderful, hey, it’s a big world.  Some people think Daniel Day-Lewis, the most acclaimed thespian of our generation, is a terrible actor.
Am I such a neurotic that I cannot enjoy something until everyone loves it in the way I do?
And I see all these silly fandom scuffles where people get really bent out of shape because You Do Not Understand The True Batman or ZOMG How Can You Not Love Star Wars and You Dumbass Picard Is Way Better Than Kirk, and some people are getting seriously upset over these things – as though they cannot rest until everyone shares their opinions.  As though somehow, a difference in taste is a wound to their very soul.
And I think what happens is that people are making the silly error that “I love it” means “It is perfect.”  This is a thought process that inevitably leads to ruin, whether it’s in fandom or work or in romance.  Something can sweep you up in whirls of dizzying rapture, but it’s not that it doesn’t have flaws – it’s that you don’t mind them.  (Usually because the good stuff is so damned good that you may not even notice the fractures in the background.)
Look, I get that this TV show or movie or comic book has spoken to something deep within you.  It expressed something important about your very nature in a way that you wished you’d been able to do it, becoming in a very real sense a part of you.  And that’s great.  That’s the power of fiction.
But then people make the leap of, “Well, if I like it, then everyone should!”, turning their love into a popularity contest, acting as if they can make this show as well-loved as possible then somehow they’ve vindicated something about themselves.  And their fandom mutates away from expressing a love for the show and into a sort of baffled belligerence that anyone could ever not like this thing so crucial to them.
Then they do the usual thing zealots do – they get angry whenever anyone points out an error with the thing they love, they take it personally, and they try to stomp that opposition to the curb so no one brings up this troubling issue ever again.  It ceases to be a fandom and more like a religion, where the One Truth Faith must prove itself over the bodies of others.
Look.  Pointing out flaws shouldn’t destroy your enjoyment.  Poke deeply at the greatest works of art in the world, and you’ll find so-called flaws.  Those flaws bother some people, don’t bother others.  They don’t bother you, apparently, and that’s all that should matter.  Love shouldn’t consist of a battle to the death to justify its existence – there will always be people who don’t like what you do.  There will always be people who don’t believe as you do.  And as long as they’re not trying to cancel your show (hint: pretty much no fan is ever trying to cancel your show, and none successfully), then their difference of opinion shouldn’t matter.
Relax.  Sit back.  Let all of those other people roll on with their hatred.  The glory of the Internet is that you can find people who like what you do, and fandom should be about accentuating and deepening that like instead of angrily justifying what you enjoy to people who wouldn’t like it anyway.
It’s a big world.  Big enough you can sit back in your living room and read the words of people who agree with you.  And on those occasions you find someone who disagrees violently, it’s okay to clear your browser cache and move the fuck on.

The Bees Are Back In Town

Who is the most popular character on my blog?  If you think it’s me, you’re wrong.
Gini?  Nope.
Basing popularity on “How often people ask about them,” the most popular person on this blog is… my bees.
And I have good news!  Watch this video!

That’s right – the bees survived the winter.  Which was a very uncertain thing for a while.  We saw the bees doing cleansing flights a while back (bees do not poop all winter, instead waiting for spring to do their business outside the hive), but then we had several cold snaps again in March and didn’t see them for a month.  It was entirely possible that the bees had died in that chilly final stretch, which included four inches of wet snow on the final weekend in March.
Ah, Cleveland.  We love your weather.
Better yet, we know the queen survived, because these were new bees.  How can you tell?  Well, younger bees do an “orientation flight” around the front of the hive, zigzagging back and forth as they map what home looks like before venturing forth, and the hive was alight with lots of bees making sense of the place.  So the queen is inside, laying eggs – precisely what we want our queen to do.
But which bees are these?  Long-term readers will know that our original bees were the Good Bees – well-tempered bees that hardly ever stung, accepting of our constant novice intrusions.  The queen in that hive died off and our attempt to re-queen didn’t take, so sadly, the Good Bees all died.  We replaced them with the Bad Bees – very hostile suckers who stung every time we got near them, and chased anyone who got near the hive.  We didn’t feed those fuckers and they died off last winter, much to our relief.
So who are these?  These are the Mystery Bees.  We intended to take care of them, but we went on a trip to Hawaii in July and then Rebecca was diagnosed with brain cancer when we got back in August, so we pretty much ignored them from July on.  We don’t know their temperament.  Alas, thanks to crazy life-issues, we have become bee-havers, not bee-keepers (as they say scornfully at the meetings), and so we must learn to take care of these guys once we get better gloves.  (The mice ate the fingertips out of our gloves.)
We’ll be doing a hive inspection once the weather warms up a bit.  But it looks like we’ve got a hive in somewhat working order.  That’s a bit of nice news, something we’ve been short on lately.

How To Boycott Chili's Effectively

On Saturday, I posted this half-assed bit of Twitter activism:

Not that choosing Chili’s was a wise decision anyway… RT @libco: Chili’s is Fundraising for Anti-Vaxxers http://t.co/vgRTZRkHmW
— Ferrett Steinmetz (@ferretthimself) April 5, 2014

You can go read the link if you want to find out what the hubbub was about, but basically, like many restaurants, Chili’s has various “days” where it donates some percentage of its profits to charity.  The charity in question was the National Autism Association – who could be against helping Autism?
Well, I could, as it turns out, since they’re apparently notoriously anti-vaccination.  (And if you’re anti-vaccination, then please.  I’d tell you to educate yourself elsewhere, but if you were capable of doing the math on it, you’d have done it by now.  Suffice it to say that your beliefs are doing a lot of harm to a lot of kids – and even if you were completely, 100% correct in your fears [which you are not], you’re basically saying, “I’d rather my kids die than get autism!”  Which, you know, not so wonderful an approach.)
And I’m pretty sure I know how this happened: some overworked schmuck at the Chili’s HQ with a ton of work on their plate saw “National Autism Association,” said, “That sounds nice,” and approved it.  That person had never had an Internet come crashing down on their head before, because usually charities to help sick people don’t come with nefarious controversies attached to them, and hadn’t done the research beyond ascertaining that they were a legitimate organization.
And so, when Chili’s reversed course, I said, “Okay, fair enough, thank you,” and undid my boycott.  (Not that it was much of a boycott anyway, seeing as I haven’t eaten at Chili’s in a decade.  My real boycott with Chili’s involves a lack of enthusiasm about their food.)
Now here’s the thing you have to remember about boycotts:
If you boycott someone permanently, you’re fucking up the boycott.
The whole point of a boycott is that there is forgiveness at the end – a way for these companies to get your money back.  I’ve been boycotting Chick-Fil-A for over a decade now, and it’s anguish, as they’re right across the street from me and I love their food and especially their delicious breakfasts.  But they’re anti-gay, and keep doing stupid anti-gay things just often enough that I’m unconvinced that I’m not hurting gay rights’ causes by filling their coffers, and so I stay away.
But if they were to do an about-face that I was comfortable with – which would, admittedly, be a high bar after years and years of disappointment – I would probably buy there more.  I would reward them for doing the right thing at last, even though it took years, because when you’re dealing with something as fiduciarily-motivated as a soulless business entity, the only form of motivation they understand is dollars over the transom.
Now, I saw a handful of folks who were still fuming at Chili’s for giving money to anti-vaxxers, saying, “Well, I’ll never eat there again!”  Those people are almost as dumb as the anti-vaxxers.  If you yank away your money permanently, what you are teaching companies is, “The slightest mistake will cost you customers you can never get back again” – which, in this day of exceptional sensitivity and Internet-stoked fires, could be any mistake.
No.  You must teach them, “You can piss us off, but you can also work to win our forgiveness.”  Which encourages them to do the right thing as we define it.  If you’ve dropped Mozilla because the CEO donated to Proposition 8 and now refuse to use Firefox ever again based on a single error, you’re doing it wrong.
People will screw up.  You have screwed up – I guarantee this.  And if all it takes for you to abandon someone forever is a single error, then you’re inflexible and punishing.  Allow the companies to err just as people do – because remember, like Soylent Green, multinational corporations are made of people, and usually underpaid people trying to work under the rapid pressures of idiot bosses.  Not every error is a concealed agenda, indicating that this company is committed to destroy everything you love.  This is a complicated world, and things frequently get lost in the whirlwind of other concerns, and it’s frequently not obvious just how awful this is until someone with more experience looks at it.
Chili’s screwed up.  They made it right, and I’m pretty sure they’ll do better vetting next time.  In this imperfect world that’s all I can ask, and in this imperfect world all I can ask is that you occasionally allow a screwup to be just a “whoops.”
There is a certain grace in accepting an apology.  Learn to do so, when you can.

The Only Advice You'll Ever Need To Hear About Writing. I'm Serious About This.

I had a friend who was having problems finishing stories, in part due to physical difficulties in typing and in part due to writers’ block.  So when she got a chance to talk to one of her idols, arguably one of the most popular writers in America right now – a man known for being kind, wise, and generally friendly – she asked him what she should do.
He told her to not write physically, and tell her stories to people instead verbally.
She wasted a year doing that.
Did Big-Name Author give her bad advice?  Yes.  My friend is socially anxious, and worried about judgment already, and so for her, trying to tell stories to people led to a year of paralytic silence.
Was Big-Name Author wrong to give her advice?  No.  But what we experienced writers often forget to tell novice writers is that writing advice is not generic.
A muse is a very finicky creature – not quite a pet, but more like a wild animal you must tempt to your doorstep via a series of elaborate machinations.  And each is different.  I have a very businesslike muse clad in a three-piece suit, a great suited moose muse possessed of a Protestant Work Ethic, who shows up the more I show up.  And so I write every day.  But I have friends who have much more hedonistic muses, sinewy muses who arrive only after they’ve spent a weekend drinking wine in the company of good friends, and so they write well only when they’re in a fine mood.
Learning how to attract our muses changes our lives, if we’re serious about writing.  I make time every day to write, which isn’t easy when I have a godchild with a terminal illness – but if I don’t, my stories don’t flow.  My friends with the hedonist-muses have to structure their lives to have wonderful parties and friends staying over, so their environment encourages their muse to show up more.
If you’re lucky, your muse is very like your Hero Author’s muse, and you put the tin of cat food out on the porch and the stray-cat muse shows up!  But if you’re unlucky, you put the tin of cat food on the porch, and you’re inside waiting for the cat to arrive while there’s a flouncy dog-muse in the back yard waiting for you to show up with a ball.
And if you’re unlucky and inexperienced, you may keep putting the cat food out on the porch for a year, thinking all muses are identical.
Now, when I say “muse,” that’s a little artsy-fartsy for me (and of course it is, as my stodgy Business Moose muse wants charts and graphs), but the point is that every writer has their own unique process by which they produce good material, and they stumble upon those processes by continual experimentation.  Some writers need to do twenty redrafts, others smudge up their manuscripts and make them worse by overthinking solutions.  Some writers must plot to get things right, others do better making up the ending as they go along.  Some writers need critique groups, others need only their own feedback.
Your goal as a writer – your only goal, really – is to find out what gets you producing your best stories.
And your muse’s comfort often comes at the expense of your own.  I mean, I’d love to be a get-it-done-in-one-draft kinda guy, but experience has shown that four to six drafts is what gets me publishable – and so I have to do the ugly work of hard revision. I’d love to work in isolation, but I need three or four people poking at all my weak points because I can’t see them in my own fiction.  I’d love to think of character interactions in terms of “petitioner” and “granter” so I could raise tension in my fiction, but when I’m in the moment I just see two people and forget about hidden agendas.  I wish I could write a story in one sitting, but I need to contemplate each sentence carefully even if I’m going to throw half of them away in redrafting.
I’m not efficient.  But I get there.
Getting there is all that matters.
Each writer’s path is quirky and weird, because creativity is quirky and weird.  And when you hear some writer saying the things you have to do, what they’re doing is saying, “Here’s how I access my muse.  She hides from me otherwise.  If your muse is similar, then this will call her.  And if not, well, bring the cat food in and try another way.”
I got some advice from that same Big-Name Writer.  He told me I needed to buckle down and forget the short stories, write novels.  I ignored him, and wrote stories, because that felt right to me.  And lo, following my inner muse turned out to lead to Great Improvement for me.  But only because I was lucky and wise enough to say, “Big-Name Writer, I love you, but that’s not gonna work.”
Keep your ears open, because other Big-Name Writers (and small ones!) will mention techniques that do work for you.  But your only goal as a writer is to find whatever crazy actions get you completing and improving stories.  If you find something that’s stopping you from making good work, then shrug it aside no matter who told you.
That’s it.
Now go find better ways to court your muse.

This Is The Best Commercial Ever. A Serious, Actual Commercial.

It is not a prank, or a comedy sketch.  This is an actual commercial done by 10:10, a British environmental group whose intentions are outlined in this Cracked article on PR disasters.
But I shan’t spoil it.  Just watch.