Another Blog Bites The Dust, Or: Why I’m Stepping Down From Social Media.

When I was twenty, I loved Howard Stern, so the essays I wrote for the college newspaper were ripoffs of his ridiculously self-revelatory radio show. If you went on the show, nothing was sacred – you’d reveal the embarrassing arguments you had with your wife, you’d discuss your weirdo quirks, you’d share your most humiliating secrets.

So that’s what I did: I wrote about myself.

And when I got my own website in 1997, I put some of those old essays up on my site, and got a mild following for That Guy Who Wrote The Wildly Personal Essays. Which continued into LiveJournal and FetLife, where I continued to expose my life for the education and entertainment and occasional punishment of crowds, until one day I hit fifty and I realized:

Why am I still living by Howard Stern rules?

Now, if I’d revealed ridiculously intimate details of my mental health and sex life and my relationships for thirty years and I felt people had a good bead on who I was, I’d probably consider that a win. But I don’t feel that they do.

At one point recently, someone reviewed a book of mine by saying something like “Ferrett sells a lot of books, seemingly because he’s a nice guy” – which is a thought I’ve been pondering a lot lately.

I can be a nice guy. I try to be. Every day I work hard to be better than the raging asshole I was in my early twenties.

Yet still: I’m intensely human, with three barriers to work with – I’m not the most socially adept person on the planet, I’m towing years of ciswhitedudely privilege that I keep unpacking one block at a time, and I have severe mental illnesses that get in the way.

All those buried assumptions mean that I can – and do – fuck up and hurt people I care about.

And on the occasions I’ve tried to write honestly about those fuckups – to say, “Hey, I was a total shithead here, please learn from my mistakes” – I almost always got misinterpreted, with well-intentioned defenders covering for me (with that old infected bandage of “You meant well”) or the folks who disliked me assuming I was trying to cover for me, because Ferrett is a nice guy and he means well and aren’t his words comforting? Maybe a little too comforting?

For years, I’ve felt like I’ve been slowly losing some remnant of my humanity – what I’d like to be seen is as a flawed human who has some pretty monumental errors to overcome, but instead what all-too-often gets passed around is “Ferrett is cool” – and while I do try to be cool to as many people as I can, with the number of people I interact with, I’m pretty much guaranteed to step on someone’s foot.

And I felt that the image I’m presenting was all too often being reduced to either “Ferrett’s a great guy” or “Ferrett is a monster pretending to be a great guy,” and neither is close to the human truth of “Ferrett has a decent batting average, but let’s not pretend he’s an all-star either.”

(And if that’s how you’ve interpreted me all along… thank you. Sincerely. Thank you.)

I’ve been working with my therapist on that for almost two years now, and increasingly feeling like a fraud. I’ve grown to dislike the public persona. I feel it’s a shallow and reductive idea of who I am. I don’t want some arbitrary image of me to become a marketing tool.

So why not stop?

On Monday, I’ll abandon my Twitter account, shut down Facebook and FetLife, and stop blogging (with one exception that I’ll discuss).

I’m really scared.

The Internet is where I make my friends. The Internet is where I find out about all those cool memes. The Internet is where I find the new and cool books, where I find out about the public crises of the day, where I find clever jokes.

But the social side of the Internet is where I also feel like I’m exuding a persona, and despite two years of trying to unentangle that persona, I haven’t gotten closer to a solution.

I don’t know what I’ll do with all that free time. I know how many hours a day I spend reflexively checking into Twitter, chatting with buddies. If you have a group chat of people who know me and could use a Ferrett, well, I’d like the company.

(Ironically, the place I feel most comfortable is Facebook, where I’m mostly with my friends, but Facebook is also totally fucking evil and I was planning on shutting it down come New Years’ Eve anyway, so that’s gone.)

If you and I have talked beforehand and you’d like to continue to talk afterwards, well, my email address is theferrett@theferrett.com, and if you have my number, well, you have my number. Maybe I’ll transition to secret Slack servers and be just as content.

But if I’m not, I’ll get by.

Another issue: the Internet is also where I’ve been meeting my partners – and I think that has to stop, too.

Because I met my wife online, I used to think that you could judge compatibility through texts and emails, and so when we went poly I was happy to have near-strangers down for a test weekend to see whether our smooching was compatible – and while the communications usually went well on both sides, occasionally they really, disastrously didn’t, so I stopped having people over. Then I started flirting at kink conventions, and again, that usually went well, but there were a couple of occasions where I inadvertently pressured people, so I stopped that.

And while I have a handful of fulfilling sexual relationships I have gleaned from meeting people on the Internets (and thank you if you’re one of them), the Internet courtship means there’s often not enough real-life time to work problems out, leading to relationships which go really well until we need to hash out complex problems that don’t do well with texted words or cold phone calls. (Also see: mental health issues, on either side of the equation.) That’s led to some relationships that turned out to be fairly traumatic, if not downright abusive, for me.

And that last paragraph reveals another problem with dating while being a public persona: It could describe several of my relatonships, and yet any of my exes who read that might think it was specifically targeted at them. Blogging about personal issues without revealing personal details has been a continual landmine as long as I’ve written about polyamory, and there comes a point where the public discussions wind up hurting people who think that’s aimed at them – even if it’s not.

If I’ve been flirting with you, please – continue to flirt. But I’m going to be far more cautious in moving forward (and it’s not like it was easy before).

And when writing, or teaching, about polyamory becomes an active hindrance to fulfilling personal relationships, well, sorry, I gotta choose. So rather than risking people feeling called out by an essay that might not have even been about them, that aspect of my life’s gotta die on the vine.

Note that I haven’t said I’ll be off the Internet forever. Because I’m still writing books. I’ve got my new book AUTOMATIC RELOAD due out sometime in May, and I’ll doubtlessly be writing essays to remind you of it and saying “Hi I’m here” because, well, that’s what authors gotta do.

And I may write a few personalish essays when I get back, because that’s what reminds you I’m alive come the Novel.

But my hope is that going dark for a few months will burn some of this need to perform out of me. It’s not you, as the saying goes, it’s me. It’s all too easy when I’m having a bad day to turn to the brightness of social media, to say “HEY PAY ATTENTION TO ME” and get the attention that maybe’s not healthy.

The goal is for that to be gone, or at least to massively lessen the overlap between my personal and my public life. I may fail at that. (Also see: Human.) But I can at least give it a try.

If you’d like to stay in touch, the one place I will commit to writing once a month at it is in my personal newsletter. I’ll keep you informed there, so subscribe if you’d like the opportunity to see me nerding out about weird things.

And, as noted, if you already know me and feel like chatting privately or group chats, I’m amenable. I just don’t wanna be OMG FERRETT IS HERE, but rather “Hey! Good to see you.”

In any case, I’m leaving things up over the weekend so if anyone wants to know what happened, it’s out long enough to propagate.

And if I don’t catch you… have a great goddamned day.

Announcing My New Book: Automatic Reload!

CYBER Monday? I thought you said CYBORG Monday!

So let’s talk about my new cyborg rom-com with explosions AUTOMATIC RELOAD, now available for preorder in a bookstore near YOU!

(Oh, and if you share this post on either Facebook or Twitter I’ll enter you into a drawing for a free copy so do it do it DO IT)

AUTOMATIC RELOAD’s AO3 tags would be:

* Superhuman female assassins with panic disorder
* Next-generation cybercombat in a world that’s made human soldiers obsolete
* Quippy banter in the face of deadly threats
* Sentient vacuum cleaners as pets
* Maintenancepunk
* Kissing books

And if you’re looking for personal quirks of Ferrett wedged in, how about:
* Opposite Cat made flesh
* Programming and how image processing applies to high-velocity firefights
* Cigar culture
* James Bond-style adventures with the misogyny stripped off

Anyway: AUTOMATIC RELOAD won’t be coming out for a few months, but you can order it today! From Amazon! Barnes and Noble! Or may I suggest your faithful independent bookstore?

https://www.indiebound.org/book/9781250168214

And as noted – if you share this post on social media, I’ll put you in a drawing to win a free copy by Christmas!

HERE IS MAH BOOK

IS FULLA SPLOSIONS AN SMOOCHING

PLEASE BE A HALP

MARRY XMAXS!

How Disco Elysium’s Skill Tree Teaches You Valuable Life Lessons

So Disco Elysium. Best game of the year. If you like great writing, in the vein of Planescape: Torment, then buy it right away.

But Disco Elysium is great in part because it makes some startlingly deep insights about human consciousness – and those insights are rooted straight in its skill tree.

Because in Disco Elysium, you start out with twenty-four wildly unique skills to distribute your points in – yet each of those skills not only covers the skill, but your desire to use the skill. Electrochemistry not only tracks your knowledge of drug use, but your fiending for a good shot of heroin. The Authority skill not only tells you how to respond when someone challenges your position in life’s hierarchy, but also tracks your need for respect.

Furthermore: Each of those twenty-four skills is a unique voice within your head, fully characterized. Conceptualization is forever trying to make sense of the world for you, making strange observations. Savoir Faire is lofty, hip, above it all. Encyclopedia is an eager little kid who can’t wait to info-dump what they know into your brain.

That’s all weird, but that’s not the insightful bit.

Because I played Disco Elysium in my traditional style – if there’s a way to be a charismatic psychology major in a game, I will. So I dumped my hard-earned points into Rhetoric, Suggestion, and Drama as the game went on, becoming more and more insightful.

And as I maxed out those skills to superhuman levels, I got a lot worse at the game.

Because the skills were not just skills, but personality traits unto their own. And my mighty Rhetoric skill was forever leaping into conversations, mentioning this person had a bad argument that I could dismantle; my flex of a Logic skill informed me that this human being had just contradicted themself, would I like to make a skill check to point that out?

And unlike every other RPG in the galaxy, just because Disco Elysium gives you a skill check doesn’t mean that it is wise to take that skill check.

What I discovered as the game went on is that Rhetoric was not actually my friend. It allowed me to out-argue people – but often that just made them sullenly compliant, or swayed them away from helpful insights they might have been able to offer, or it let me talk myself into bad ideas that a less-debateful person might have avoided. Taking every Encyclopedia check made me into a know-it-all. Logic could point out when someone contradicted themselves, but we all do that, and maybe Empathy would have been a better choice.

The game eventually became about not just having these immense skills, but knowing when to use them.

Which reflects a lot of my personal life. I’m a tenacious debater, fiercely committed to the tussle of ideas both in the public and personal sphere. But there have been times I’ve been so caught up in “winning the argument” that I failed to notice that I was attempting to debate someone out of a legitimate complaint, or so caught up in pursuing contradictions that I missed the deep well of suffering and denial that those contradictions sprung from.

Disco Elysium is a unique experience because of all games, it teaches you that there’s a big difference between having a strength and knowing when to use it. And the skill tree is not quite as treacherous as I’m making it seem – usually, getting a good roll leads to good results.

But you have to be careful. Because it’s not enough to have the highest IQ in the room. You have to balance that out with the emotional intelligence to know when it’s time to apply those skills, and when it’s time to not be misled by the internal biases of your own strengths.

It’s a lot closer to life. And a lot more meaningful.

And, it must be said, a lot more satisfying when you nail that balance.

Hello. I Have A Penis. Are You Turned On Yet?

My penis can even be erect for you! I mean, that’s gotta set me apart, right?

No? But wait, there’s more! My penis (erect) likes to receive blowjobs! That’s a helluva draw, I know.

But this penis – which, just to remind you, I am currently in possession of – can also be inserted into your vagina, ladies! In fact, in addition to my penis-delivery methods, I can also give you graphic details of all the ways I would like my penis to intersect with your body!

No, I won’t check to see if you’d like those penile intrusions. Why would I? If I’m turned on, you must be. That’s the way arousal works.

Just so you can verify the ownership of this penis, I have several options to send you photos of it, which I will whether you asked for them or not:

• Penis in a bathroom
• Penis next to a beer can or flashlight
• Penis with a hand gripping the base so the penis looks bigger.

So act now, to get a penis! I’ll deliver! Or, more actually, I’ll probably just talk a lot about delivering and then chicken out and masturbate to pictures of you, then ghost. But that’s okay, because it’s satisfying to me. And therefore you.

(WARNING: The owner of the penis makes no promises as to his ability to maintain an erection, maintain interest in a woman when he has no erection, maintain a safe operating environment for any woman engaged in isolated activities with him, maintain a healthy emotional distance where he won’t fuck you once and then get murderously jealous of everyone else in your life regardless of your requests for him to leave, maintain a washed physical form, maintain a job, maintain ethical integrity with regards to the spouse he’s probably not mentioning, maintain his mansplaining ascertainment, maintain his secrecy with regards to any photos you may send him, or maintain the rains on the plain in Spain. Please take penis as directed. Do not taunt happy fun penis or he might just up and strangle you. For real.)

What Do You Do When Someone’s Flying High But About To Crash?

So you’ve got a friend who’s walking into a field full of red flags.

Usually, those red flags are relationship-based – “Oh, we opened up our relationship, but I’m not allowed to date men, only women!” they cry, thrilled about the hot sex they’re going to be getting, unaware of how that story usually ends. Or they’re a desperate guy who’s ecstatic to have his first real girlfriend, a girlfriend who is quietly encouraging to drop all his friends and hobbies because she doesn’t really seem to like who he is, only who he might be with a little molding.

But he’s in love, so what can you say?

Sometimes the Waving Field of Red Flags comes from other, more mundane topics – the friend who’s quitting their job to sell CutCo knives for a living, the relative who’s found a friendly bank to loan them money to buy a house they can’t possibly afford.

The specific shade of this Waving Field of Red Flags doesn’t matter. The point is that they’re rhapsodic because they’re at the top of this particular rollercoaster ride, the point of max exhilaration where it’s all giddy anticipation as the coaster ratchets to the top, and they don’t see the massive plunge coming.

Yet.

But experience tells you it’s gonna happen.

So how do you warn them off? Especially when they’re so goddamned happy right now?

And this is when my take on advice comes in strong.

Because nobody seeks advice when they know what they’re doing. You get advice when you’re not sure about which way to go – things like, “What college is best?” and “How do I save for retirement?” There’s usually a research stage before life’s decisions, and that’s when someone is receptive to input.

Ah, but in matters of the heart…

Once the emotions kick in, they’re no longer seeking advice – in fact, logic becomes their enemy. Because when you’re really committed to this new relationship or this lovely house they could buy or this profitable dream of a career they could have, the logical portion of most people’s brains stops seeking input and starts becoming a Rationalization Engine. They’ll cling to any sign of goodness as long as it supports the facts they want to see.

So if you think a friend’s in trouble, well, you can talk. Heck, you almost certainly should. But you have to realize, you’re probably not going to make a difference. They may claim they’re open to feedback, but in truth they’re probably locked and loaded. At best you might be able to wrestle them off the path through a combination of leverage and guilt, but even then you’ll have to deal with their resentment because they were sure they had a good thing – and maybe they’ll fall for the same trick the next time.

So what do you do?

You change your conception of “advice.”

Because the way I see it, advice isn’t actually meant to change someone’s point of view.

It’s a lockbox you bury in their basement.

Because call me cynical, but what I find is that most people won’t change their behavior when things are going right – they only consider alternate paths when they’ve burnt everything to the ground and are wandering dazed through the wreckage, trying to figure out what the heck happened.

Your job is to seed the basement with enough fireproof lockboxes so when they’re pawing through the ashes, they might find the box of your old advice and go, “Crap, that’s what I did.”

Or, if you’d like to be slightly more hopefully, advice is the box that they open when things start to turn sour and they go, “Oh, maybe my friend was right.” Sometimes they leave a little earlier thanks to what you said. It can happen.

But the important thing is this: Advice almost never stops someone in their tracks.

And that’s actually good. Because you’re not always right. I know I’ve done some damn fool things that worked out in my life that arguably shouldn’t have, most notably “Quitting my job and moving to Alaska to marry my Internet sweetheart,” a move that literally nobody at the wedding including the bride and groom thought would work out, and yet here we are twenty years later.

I’m not saying you’re not probably right. But advice is fraught with its own issues – your personal biases, differences in personality, misinterpretations, dumb luck. If what someone’s going to is super-obvious then yes, maybe you wanna go to the mat, but the darkly cynical side of me would like to suggest a darkly cynical solution:

Some people gotta catch wood or drown.

And like the lockboxes, the best you can do sometimes is hold your dumbass friend’s hand while they descend into darkness, knowing that this is probably disaster, knowing that they’ll need a friendly face when this is all done to wipe the ashes off their cheeks and help them back to their feet.

Or maybe you throw a party in a few years and celebrate because whee, you were wrong, it’s the twentieth wedding anniversary and wasn’t it great that you didn’t stop them?

But probably not. This is probably disaster. But your advice is not meant to wall them off from this. Your advice is that lockbox they open up later on, when they’re confused and hurt, and maybe you help them to shape their experience with this so that next time, next time, they’re a little slower to plunge into stupidity.

That’s how cynical people keep friends. We love, but we don’t expect. We stash the love for them for when they need it later. And be ready to pick them up when they fall.

That’s the best we can do. And sometimes, hopefully, it’s even good enough.

Potentially Perilous Poly Patterns: The Catalyst

You’re polyamorous, so you’re able to date anyone you want. That’s good!

Except the person you’ve fallen in love with is married, and they’re not polyamorous. That’s bad!

EXCEPT that after some awkward discussions, the married couple decides that they’ve been wanting to expand their horizons for some time – and since you’re right there and waiting, they’ll open up their relationship, starting with you. That’s good!

If you’re thinking “Isn’t there a hidden ‘That’s bad’ coming?”, well, you’re way ahead of the curve.

Because I’ve written before about how first-timer couples have a habit of treating their new polyamorous partners more like an experiment than an actual love. (Insert hashtag #notallcouples.) They tend not to see this new lover as a person with needs, but rather as some exciting adjunct to their existing relationship – they get more sex, they get more excitement, they get the fascinating experience of handling jealousy and attractions in a different way –

And that pattern often works for the third party, right up until that person has a need that conflicts with the needs of the couple.

Classically speaking, the trigger point that causes the break is one of two things:

• The other partner is “okay” with polyamory as long as they also get to boink the outside partner at the same time, which usually leads to a couple of uncomfortable threesomes and a discussion of “No, I just want to date this person, not both of you”;
• One of the two couple-partners gets way more into the external partner than the other half was expecting, at which point the reins get yanked and yanked back hard.

At which point there’s an awkward discussion about Oh, sorry, we weren’t ready for this and the new person gets tossed out on their ear.

Basically: We like you, but we’re not willing to accommodate you.

Now, that’s all a known danger, Khaleesi. Being people’s firsts runs the obvious risk of becoming someone’s last when they discover this is not for them. I’m not saying never to do starter poly – even though, full revelation, I don’t – but I am saying that if you’re attracted to anyone who’s in flux, you need to be prepared for the very real concept that this might not evolve the way you thought it would.

Yet there’s an ugly kicker to all of this:

Sometimes, it turns out that you were not only an experiment for this couple, but you were a successful one.

What often happens afterwards is that the couple has been on autopilot for so long that you’ve woken them up again – your new and sexy hotness has gotten them to talk about sex more and started up all those old kinky negotiations they stopped having, and the threat you posed to their happiness actually forced them into talking more and hashing out issues they’d quietly buried.

You see them around. They’re lovey-dovey in ways they weren’t before, their spark flaring ever-hotter, maybe even dating quietly on the side in better-defined polyamorous relationships. And one of the partners – the one you were into – will look at you and give a little sigh-smile that goes Oh you kid but that part’s over because they’ve prioritized themselves properly and you didn’t fit.

Which can be a heartbreak if you’re still single and looking. Or even just still not over that person.

But you gotta ask yourself when you’re getting into a relationship with inexperienced folks: Am I an actual priority, or just a potential catalyst? And keep in mind, there’s nothing wrong with being a catalyst if you want to. It can be super-fun being someone’s gateway to a new world.

Just… keep your heart properly protected. Because if you think this is A True Relationship and it turns out that you were a nice-to-have, you can damage yourself in ways you don’t want to. And you’re worth keeping safe.

Joker: A Review

There’s been a lot of critical frothing about how JOKER is the first superhero movie that’s worthy of an Oscar. So let me say this:

JOKER is what an Oscar movie looks like to people who haven’t seen a lot of Oscar movies. It’s mirroring the superficial aspects of much better films, but without the underlying philosophies that made them actually resonant. So what you get is a pastiche of other, more interesting, movies, held together by one amazing performance from Joaquin Phoenix.

There’s also been a lot of critical frothing about how JOKER is an incel’s paradise, designed to make sad rejected men feel vindicated when they lash out at society. So let me also say this:

JOKER is not really interesting enough to launch a movement like that. If you think of FIGHT CLUB, remember all the interesting philosophical questions about what it meant to be a man in this modern age and how nihilism wasn’t quite the answer but neither was faith?

Well, JOKER doesn’t have that.

Remember how TAXI DRIVER indicated that Travis Bickle was an alienated loner, but also looked insightfully into the ways he manufactured his own loneliness and in fact played into the idea that maybe being the savior of women wasn’t entirely a selfless act?

Well, JOKER doesn’t have that either.

Now, all that sounds like I hated this movie – and I didn’t! It was well worth my AMC Moviepass money, and I had a good time in the theater. My advice is that you go see it!

But JOKER has been blown up to be all sorts of interesting things that it’s not actually interested in being.

Because JOKER is, at its heart, a comic-book movie. It exists in an absurd cartoon world where, in the course of literally three days, two entirely different men decide to beat the shit out of a random clown. It exists in a world where a guy shoots three people on a train and the newspapers thunder headlines of, “SHOOTING RICH ASSHOLES: A NEW TREND?” because the plot demands it.

If you’ve ever seen any of the PLANET OF THE APES movies, you know where literally every character in the film is a completely vindictive asshole, with each supporting character’s entire goal is to grind down the protagonists’ lives until they finally snap?

Well, that’s JOKER.

It’s a big, sloppy soap opera of a movie, and that’s absolutely great, but the Oscar movies it’s trying to emulate usually have one other aspect that JOKER purposefully ignores:

A philosophy.

And Oscar films love a little philosophy.

A more interesting film – and mind you, JOKER is pretty interesting as it is – would have made some judgments about baby Joker; whether people were in some way right to reject him, or whether society itself is designed to hinder some sorts of people and help others. It might have asked how a real-life Joker comes to be, and as such it might have been either sympathetic to the incel movement (don’t be) or deconstructing the idea of it, or just looking at what a nice white dude can get away with.

JOKER… isn’t any of that. Joaquin Phoenix has said specifically he didn’t want anyone to understand or sympathize with Joker, he wanted him to be something that no psychiatrist could diagnose, and as such the film is oddly hands-off in asking the question, “Is this guy justified?” It basically rains shit down on the Joker in an entirely predictable fashion where if you ask, “What would make this guy the most miserable?”, you can call every beat of the plot.

Which isn’t to say that it might not launch its own movement if it gets popular enough; hell, THE MATRIX has shown that even with an explicit philosophy, you show a movie to enough people and they’ll start seeing things that aren’t really there (cough cough Red Pill man-movement centered around a film made by two trans people transmuting their experiences into science fiction). JOKER might well honestly create something, but that won’t be so much the movie as aimless folks looking for any handy movement to latch on to.

What I suspect we’ll get are a lot of edgelords in cosplay, which means we’ll see a reduction in the number of Rorschach masks sold this Halloween.

But JOKER is like an Oscar movie in one very specific way: there is a brand of Oscar movie, at least one per year, that features an amazing actor’s performance housed in a pretty mediocre movie. If you every watched Philip Seymour Hoffman in CAPOTE, he absolutely blazed every moment of the screen nailing becoming someone else entirely, a masterwork of actor’s skills.

The plot? Predictable. The directing? Mediocre. But you come for the acting and don’t expect much else, and you’ll be okay.

JOKER is kind of like CAPOTE in that Joaquin Phoenix’s performance is every bit as good as people say, and watching him transform himself into the unknowable is well worth the price of admission. And the directing is quite good at times, coming alive at the correct moments of violence.

But one of my prime moments of nerddom is that I saw THE DARK KNIGHT with Neil Gaiman on opening night (along with the other 17 members of my Clarion class). And he came out frowning and said, “I’m not sure if I watched a magnificent movie or just a magnificent performance.”

JOKER is a magnificent performance. Go see it for the one-man show. But when it falls way short of winning the Best Picture Oscar this year, don’t be surprised.