So far, Agents of SHIELD has been a boon to the worst kind of geek/nerd - the geek/nerd who thinks that they are there to call nerds nerds and that makes them some sort of alpha badass nerd. I've had a hard time finding a review of Agents that was both negative and didn't devolve into someone furiously trying to smugly troll Joss Whedon fans. "Oh no, your little nerd god has messed up, you sad sweaty little nerds!" is pretty much the tone of every commentary about that show that wasn't favorable. I guess folks love an underdog for only so long - they have to hate that same underdog once he's an actual success. Gotta keep that cred!
It's too bad, though, that Agents of SHIELD is really, really not great. It's not bad, by the standard of typical prime time network television, it's just... bland. Nearly no television show has ever hit the ground running, though, and we're only three episodes into it, so there's room for consideration still. Look at the first season of Buffy, for Christ's sake. It was objectively terrible at start and moved into "decently engaging" territory by the end of that season. Firefly, by another comparison, was one of the rare ones that do start strong, but it's fair to remember that you can't do that every time, no matter how good you are.
So I'm skeptical but I'm not personally willing to call time of death on it or anything. It doesn't have the problems hardwired in like Dollhouse had - a shoddy premise held up by bland characters all around - but there are definitely some similarities.
The characters, save a rare few, are just... well, they're walking piles of tropes. You have Perky Tech Girl, Unremarkable Loner Agent Guy, Hardened Veteran With Painful Past, and on and on and on. They're all just seriously a jumble of characters who come off like someone just took a list of traits and assigned them to different stereotypes rather than actually trying to build characters. By episode three, if you want to keep a clipboard of this, we've pretty much checked off Obligatory Dark Time In Backstory from nearly all of them except the Excitable Nerd Puppy Twins. I'm sure, since their's wasn't shoved in our face immediately, that it'll somehow be the absolute worst. Like, "Oh we're so perky and wonderful to cover up the fact we were molested by ten-faced alien demons" or something.
And the pilot. She has a PAINFUL BACKSTORY!!!! that, like Shepherd Book, gets communicated to us in the most obtrusive, graceless "subtle" ways ever. And if you missed her BACKSTORY!!!! don't worry, someone will make some forced reference to it in a few minutes. It's not even like the BACKSTORY!!!! is even that mysterious - it's pretty obvious given the clues dropped so far. It's almost the same as if Coulson held up Wile E. Coyote type placards every five seconds that pointed to her and said "BACKSTORY EXISTS, AND SINCE YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT IT IS, YOU ARE INTERESTED!"
Coulson gets by, mostly due to the actor's ability to turn over-use of deadpans and oneliners into something that doesn't wear as quickly as it should. And, to be fair to the whole show, it's hard to say if it's the actors who are unable to really convey convincing characters, or if the writing and direction is just that phoned in. By the end of the third episode, the guest bad guy (who will hopefully be recurring) immediately captures the smarm and witty line delivery Whedon shows tend to rely on, though... so it's probably the actors. Who's to say if that's Whedon's fault or network interference or whatever, but they just seem like they were picked for their ability to read lines while looking young and hip in whatever soulless costumes the show put them in. Even down to the wardrobe, nothing about these folks feels vaguely human or real, just purely manufactured.
Agents, so far, is just pretty much what would have happened if Firefly was handed to someone in marketing to have everything adjusted for the network. The parallels between the two shows are numerous and, unfortunately, not exaggerated. People see the plane and start making the jokes, but it doesn't take long for you to realize you can line the two up without having to make very difficult or forced comparisons.
But, I am optimistic. Not, as some sad little people would like to believe, because I am some breathless sweaty Joss fan-nerd. Just because the show does have promise, and even Daniel Radcliffe was godawful when that whole Potter thing started. Granted, he was like 10 or something, but hey you never know. If I had given up on Fringe in the first three episodes (and I thought about it, honestly), I'd have missed out. And the quality of the show has definitely ticked upward since the... life raft. So, here's hoping.
Tuesday, October 15, 2013
Tuesday, September 10, 2013
Adjectives on the Typewriter
The funny thing about the whole Penny Arcade / PAX / Dickwolves / What The Fuck Happened deal is that it's great seeing exactly what people are taking away from it all. And by "it all", by the way, I mean "whatever part of the ongoing story they wish to focus on and ignore the rest." The sad reality of the situation is that far too many people are trying to minimize things so that they can.
Before I get too far into this, let me give people the obligatory link for those who have not followed this so closely. PS, if you think "This is about that WoW comic forever ago, right?", then you qualify as someone who has not followed this pretty much at all. Anyway, here's this -
http://debacle.tumblr.com/post/3041940865/the-pratfall-of-penny-arcade-a-timeline
It links to a timeline of events and is attempting "neutrality", but when you've named your article in this manner, you sort've lose that out of the gate. That being said, it's pretty thorough. As a matter of fact, it's down to minutiae so thin that I actually appear indirectly twice on that list. Once for participation in the Gamers With Jobs forum thread referenced - and it's not even the longest or most detailed thread there regarding this particular deal. Once again because I (years ago) established the group called Dickwolves of Austin on Facebox. More on that in a minute.
I've been told no good story starts with the phrase "what happened was..." So, what happened was Penny Arcade ran that comic we're all familiar with and there was some backlash. Some of the backlash was reasonable and measured. Some of it was just hollering stupidity generally reserved for the Internet's Anger Bandwagon once the band on said wagon begins playing a screed at someone. At the time, my takeaway was pretty much this - yes, rape culture is a thing. No, this comic is not the goddamned Devil. Yes, it is worth noting that this comic is probably a low-level part of the problem. No, it seemed like few people were actually saying that.
Everyone rushes to have their goddamned teaching moments, which usually break down thusly: "You are ignorant, and I am trying to enlighten you, slob.... why are you angry at me, cave man? Oh, it must be my massive intellect and empathy that you cannot fathom. Feh!" Naturally, there was a lot of this. Frankly, on both sides: We had the people trying to enlighten Mike and Jerry while looking down their nose at them, and we then had the counter-enlighteners attempt to roll their eyes and explain why their relaxed, not-so-wound-up-PC-bullshit viewpoint was truly what the world needed.
For my part, I thought it was funny. So I went on Facebox and used the name for a social group for some gaming locals to coordinate this, that, and the other. It was a gaming joke, we needed a team name, and not too shortly after, the T-Shirts started rolling out. It seemed to fit, and to me, it was a reminder of what happens when people just start taking their shit way too seriously.
Of course, what rolled out with (and before) this was Mike going out into the Internet and explaining to everyone how he wasn't a bad guy and that they were overreacting. And by that, I mean he was visiting blogs and firing off Tweets just directly attempting to troll the fuck out of anyone who might notice them. There's a problem that crept into the discourse that I didn't notice until later - this was, in its own way, an interesting example of something people don't understand about rape or rape culture: power is discounted by the powerful. Mike, feeling cornered and bullied, lashed out while he (intentionally at points, but not at others) rallied others to his cause. I mean, there's endless hordes of people who get told their "hilarious" joke about women or black people or gays should probably be not said. Among those people, there are many who feel like they're being cornered and bullied by PC culture, just as Mike did.
Mike, by the way, has millions of fans. Those people who felt bullied share the views of a vast majority. Mike, in this equation, was able to say a few things and summon a ravening horde of people to tell the complainers to shut up. Their views were not welcome. And so on. Summon Dire Dickwolf VI, I suppose, opting for the ability to get a bunch rather than just one.
So this is how things started - the first few steps. The problem that emerged immediately is that those who made this about the comic missed an important step. It wasn't about the comic, not really. It was about the problem such brazen jokes about rape contributes to. It was also about picking your battles - people constantly decried "this was just a run of the mill comic, they make jokes like this all the time." Well, if this was so run of the mill, why did the PA folks decide to pick this particular battle? At this point they were the ones who made it an exception when they made a follow up comic belittling and straw-manning the complaints and releasing the shirt about it, rather than just shrugging off the criticism they deal with on an ongoing basis.
So, lesson 1 here is pick your goddamned battles.
Lesson 2 is a matter of reality checking certain things. As this went on and then morphed into Mike going on to make fun of transgender people (and then, once again, attacking those who felt insulted and mocked), there was another ongoing narrative evolving. Set beside the boring, beaten-to-death mantra of "Oh, just loosen up! You're so PC! /eyeroll" was emerging the defense that Mike and Jerry were just regular guys so why did anything they say have any impact, anyway?
Guess what, folks. You can make an online comic about your self created avatars. You can put your names out there as game reviewers many people wish to hear from. You can create an online community and then a real live one (PAX!, which I attended the first one) where you are treated like celebrities. You can then create a web series that is pretty much you all the time, and then several more where it's you dealing with other people.
But, after all that, you cannot try to giggle and duck your head and try to pretend you're just "some guys" no one should listen to. Or rather, I suppose you can. But then you're just being intellectually dishonest. Or, at best, you're being kinda dumb. In neither case are you correct.
It was about this time where I became certain I didn't really back the right horse, here. Mike was obviously just going on a bro-ass rampage, and Jerry was being pretty silent. At this point I wondered what was going on in Jerry's head, and I wondered about Robert Khoo, their business director. Were these guys just causing him nightmares left and right?
We got our answer recently, when the third hit in this Triforce of Children's Behavior finally made itself known. In this year's PAX, Robert got on stage with Jerry and Mike to host one of the best attended events in the con - just the three of them chatting about PA and stuff. You know, no idea why people think those two have anything interesting to say or why Jerry or Mike might think people want to hear from them. Anyway. Robert asks if there's anything they regret, and taking the look of a young, downtrodden hero underdog in the novel of his life, Mike says they should have never stopped the Dickwolves shirts.
I am not a sorcerer, but I feel like I get what he meant. We should have never let them bully us and push us around. And I'm going to say this in a way that evokes a man quietly and nobly standing up for unpopular ideals!
This, of course, resonated with the crowd, which went wild. YOU TELL 'EM, STEVEDAVE, on an epic scale. Poor Mike, a man with a small media empire and adulation of hundreds of thousands, allowed someone to make a sound business and moral decision for him - a decision that he, at the time, said he was behind and he was totally learning from his mistakes about. He couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to be right.
And that's the problem with how we discuss matters like this. People don't want to learn. People don't want to show empathy or understand. They want to be right. They want it to be a fight, and they want to be on the team that's the badasses! So, instead of trying to look at the actual problem and filter out the noise, we have people who embrace the noise. They HAVE to have the noise, because they can fight that noise. Who cares that people made articulate, reasonable comments about the situation. Fuck that! Let's focus on the slobbering idiots that everyone knows are slobbering idiots. Can we focus on those, please? I just want to address the idiots, now, so that I have an easy target and we can pretend there are only idiots. Great.
Thankfully, someone offered up this piece to encapsulate the whole thing -
http://webegeekspc.com/editorial-people-ethical-treatment-dickwolves/
This is perfect. It's self-righteousness wrapped up in the "I don't care if what I say is mean, it's true!" smugness. It's blended with a large dose of false equivocation because, well... this man takes some assumptions about what people are saying vs what they really think and then goes from there. It's one thing to guess, but the whole premise of this is, "I can see into your mind, checkmate."
Folks like this are part of the problem. They want the fight, because to them any backlash is simply justification.
Of course, the "other side is just as bad!" Naturally. There were rape and death threats towards the PA guys and their family. Unequivocally bad. But the problem with the "everyone's wrong, in their own way" bullshit is that such statements are just shortcuts for making the issue no longer about the problem. It's not the problem we're talking about now, it's trying to pretend there's not really a problem and oh hey aren't I just so emotionally balanced and enlightened? But, sure, both "sides" have done something wrong.
Who the flying fuck cares about that? This is not a team sport, people. What's important is that people need to understand what the actual problem is. Can we discuss that? No? Fine... I mean, sure. We can't talk about the problem. Because there is a problem, and this whole arc really explains it very well. "Shut up about rape. We don't wanna hear it. You don't really have a problem, you're just making it up in your head. It's not all that bad. Oh god, not this PC bullcrap again. Sure rape happens, but this isn't the way or place to talk about it. What is the way or place to talk about it? I dunno, but let me be clear - I get to decide, not you."
And that is pretty much it. That's the crux of the "Pro-Dickwolf" thing, which - by the way - is not actually a thing. Pro-Dickwolf means nothing. This isn't about a comic, sorry! Not anymore. If it were still about a comic, this would probably be pretty silly, so I can see why people are desperately clinging to that notion. But this turned into a couple of guys using their voice and power to purport that people with much smaller voices and much less power were bullying them. If you can grasp that, then you grasp the real problem as a wider issue. Someone complains, and the tables are turned on the complainer rather than the person who has caused offense or damage.
I don't personally care if people want to boycott PAX or not. I already own a Dickwolf shirt, so I guess the "damage" in that regard is done. I'm not going to burn it or anything, because it's a reminder, still, of what happens when people take their shit and themselves way too seriously. However, really, it's not the same people that reminder started off with. Instead of learning something, everyone instead saw "WE ARE BEING ATTACKED. QUICK, FORM A GROUP TO FEEL LIKE IT'S A WAR FOR SOCIAL VALUES OR SOMETHING" rather than just skimming over the information and trying to learn something.
While the cries for boycotts and righteous screams for these guys' heads irritate me to no end, I find it less offensive than the people who try to pretend that they're some last ragged band of downtrodden heroes fighting against the PC Police or something. Mike and Jerry are the ones with power, here, and they have abused it in a fantastic fashion, over the course of this whole event. We get very wrapped up in trying to be contrarian (another shortcut for trying to look smart) when people claim injury or offense, and in that rush we forget that someone started it. PA was wrong to begin with, because while perhaps you can argue the comic was harmless, so was the response. Who did it hurt for people to say, "I think Penny Arcade promotes rape culture" when the people saying it were talking to themselves and had blogs with audiences numbering in the maybe-hundreds. Who did it hurt? Then who did it hurt when Mike went out of his way to mock and belittle those people on that and many later occasions. When PA as a group followed up with the comic that equated comments about rape culture to stating "You are making rapists!", a straw man so ludicrous that I'm shocked someone like Jerry let it go. They literally became the thing people were accusing them of at that point. And that's really all there is to it.
I mean, what I'm saying here is that I need a new name for my Facebox group.
But the steeled eye, the tight jaw, say it all.
The white paint, the plastic saints, say it all.
Somebody has got to say it all.
Before I get too far into this, let me give people the obligatory link for those who have not followed this so closely. PS, if you think "This is about that WoW comic forever ago, right?", then you qualify as someone who has not followed this pretty much at all. Anyway, here's this -
http://debacle.tumblr.com/post/3041940865/the-pratfall-of-penny-arcade-a-timeline
It links to a timeline of events and is attempting "neutrality", but when you've named your article in this manner, you sort've lose that out of the gate. That being said, it's pretty thorough. As a matter of fact, it's down to minutiae so thin that I actually appear indirectly twice on that list. Once for participation in the Gamers With Jobs forum thread referenced - and it's not even the longest or most detailed thread there regarding this particular deal. Once again because I (years ago) established the group called Dickwolves of Austin on Facebox. More on that in a minute.
I've been told no good story starts with the phrase "what happened was..." So, what happened was Penny Arcade ran that comic we're all familiar with and there was some backlash. Some of the backlash was reasonable and measured. Some of it was just hollering stupidity generally reserved for the Internet's Anger Bandwagon once the band on said wagon begins playing a screed at someone. At the time, my takeaway was pretty much this - yes, rape culture is a thing. No, this comic is not the goddamned Devil. Yes, it is worth noting that this comic is probably a low-level part of the problem. No, it seemed like few people were actually saying that.
Everyone rushes to have their goddamned teaching moments, which usually break down thusly: "You are ignorant, and I am trying to enlighten you, slob.... why are you angry at me, cave man? Oh, it must be my massive intellect and empathy that you cannot fathom. Feh!" Naturally, there was a lot of this. Frankly, on both sides: We had the people trying to enlighten Mike and Jerry while looking down their nose at them, and we then had the counter-enlighteners attempt to roll their eyes and explain why their relaxed, not-so-wound-up-PC-bullshit viewpoint was truly what the world needed.
For my part, I thought it was funny. So I went on Facebox and used the name for a social group for some gaming locals to coordinate this, that, and the other. It was a gaming joke, we needed a team name, and not too shortly after, the T-Shirts started rolling out. It seemed to fit, and to me, it was a reminder of what happens when people just start taking their shit way too seriously.
Of course, what rolled out with (and before) this was Mike going out into the Internet and explaining to everyone how he wasn't a bad guy and that they were overreacting. And by that, I mean he was visiting blogs and firing off Tweets just directly attempting to troll the fuck out of anyone who might notice them. There's a problem that crept into the discourse that I didn't notice until later - this was, in its own way, an interesting example of something people don't understand about rape or rape culture: power is discounted by the powerful. Mike, feeling cornered and bullied, lashed out while he (intentionally at points, but not at others) rallied others to his cause. I mean, there's endless hordes of people who get told their "hilarious" joke about women or black people or gays should probably be not said. Among those people, there are many who feel like they're being cornered and bullied by PC culture, just as Mike did.
Mike, by the way, has millions of fans. Those people who felt bullied share the views of a vast majority. Mike, in this equation, was able to say a few things and summon a ravening horde of people to tell the complainers to shut up. Their views were not welcome. And so on. Summon Dire Dickwolf VI, I suppose, opting for the ability to get a bunch rather than just one.
So this is how things started - the first few steps. The problem that emerged immediately is that those who made this about the comic missed an important step. It wasn't about the comic, not really. It was about the problem such brazen jokes about rape contributes to. It was also about picking your battles - people constantly decried "this was just a run of the mill comic, they make jokes like this all the time." Well, if this was so run of the mill, why did the PA folks decide to pick this particular battle? At this point they were the ones who made it an exception when they made a follow up comic belittling and straw-manning the complaints and releasing the shirt about it, rather than just shrugging off the criticism they deal with on an ongoing basis.
So, lesson 1 here is pick your goddamned battles.
Lesson 2 is a matter of reality checking certain things. As this went on and then morphed into Mike going on to make fun of transgender people (and then, once again, attacking those who felt insulted and mocked), there was another ongoing narrative evolving. Set beside the boring, beaten-to-death mantra of "Oh, just loosen up! You're so PC! /eyeroll" was emerging the defense that Mike and Jerry were just regular guys so why did anything they say have any impact, anyway?
Guess what, folks. You can make an online comic about your self created avatars. You can put your names out there as game reviewers many people wish to hear from. You can create an online community and then a real live one (PAX!, which I attended the first one) where you are treated like celebrities. You can then create a web series that is pretty much you all the time, and then several more where it's you dealing with other people.
But, after all that, you cannot try to giggle and duck your head and try to pretend you're just "some guys" no one should listen to. Or rather, I suppose you can. But then you're just being intellectually dishonest. Or, at best, you're being kinda dumb. In neither case are you correct.
It was about this time where I became certain I didn't really back the right horse, here. Mike was obviously just going on a bro-ass rampage, and Jerry was being pretty silent. At this point I wondered what was going on in Jerry's head, and I wondered about Robert Khoo, their business director. Were these guys just causing him nightmares left and right?
We got our answer recently, when the third hit in this Triforce of Children's Behavior finally made itself known. In this year's PAX, Robert got on stage with Jerry and Mike to host one of the best attended events in the con - just the three of them chatting about PA and stuff. You know, no idea why people think those two have anything interesting to say or why Jerry or Mike might think people want to hear from them. Anyway. Robert asks if there's anything they regret, and taking the look of a young, downtrodden hero underdog in the novel of his life, Mike says they should have never stopped the Dickwolves shirts.
I am not a sorcerer, but I feel like I get what he meant. We should have never let them bully us and push us around. And I'm going to say this in a way that evokes a man quietly and nobly standing up for unpopular ideals!
This, of course, resonated with the crowd, which went wild. YOU TELL 'EM, STEVEDAVE, on an epic scale. Poor Mike, a man with a small media empire and adulation of hundreds of thousands, allowed someone to make a sound business and moral decision for him - a decision that he, at the time, said he was behind and he was totally learning from his mistakes about. He couldn't leave well enough alone. He had to be right.
And that's the problem with how we discuss matters like this. People don't want to learn. People don't want to show empathy or understand. They want to be right. They want it to be a fight, and they want to be on the team that's the badasses! So, instead of trying to look at the actual problem and filter out the noise, we have people who embrace the noise. They HAVE to have the noise, because they can fight that noise. Who cares that people made articulate, reasonable comments about the situation. Fuck that! Let's focus on the slobbering idiots that everyone knows are slobbering idiots. Can we focus on those, please? I just want to address the idiots, now, so that I have an easy target and we can pretend there are only idiots. Great.
Thankfully, someone offered up this piece to encapsulate the whole thing -
http://webegeekspc.com/editorial-people-ethical-treatment-dickwolves/
This is perfect. It's self-righteousness wrapped up in the "I don't care if what I say is mean, it's true!" smugness. It's blended with a large dose of false equivocation because, well... this man takes some assumptions about what people are saying vs what they really think and then goes from there. It's one thing to guess, but the whole premise of this is, "I can see into your mind, checkmate."
Folks like this are part of the problem. They want the fight, because to them any backlash is simply justification.
Of course, the "other side is just as bad!" Naturally. There were rape and death threats towards the PA guys and their family. Unequivocally bad. But the problem with the "everyone's wrong, in their own way" bullshit is that such statements are just shortcuts for making the issue no longer about the problem. It's not the problem we're talking about now, it's trying to pretend there's not really a problem and oh hey aren't I just so emotionally balanced and enlightened? But, sure, both "sides" have done something wrong.
Who the flying fuck cares about that? This is not a team sport, people. What's important is that people need to understand what the actual problem is. Can we discuss that? No? Fine... I mean, sure. We can't talk about the problem. Because there is a problem, and this whole arc really explains it very well. "Shut up about rape. We don't wanna hear it. You don't really have a problem, you're just making it up in your head. It's not all that bad. Oh god, not this PC bullcrap again. Sure rape happens, but this isn't the way or place to talk about it. What is the way or place to talk about it? I dunno, but let me be clear - I get to decide, not you."
And that is pretty much it. That's the crux of the "Pro-Dickwolf" thing, which - by the way - is not actually a thing. Pro-Dickwolf means nothing. This isn't about a comic, sorry! Not anymore. If it were still about a comic, this would probably be pretty silly, so I can see why people are desperately clinging to that notion. But this turned into a couple of guys using their voice and power to purport that people with much smaller voices and much less power were bullying them. If you can grasp that, then you grasp the real problem as a wider issue. Someone complains, and the tables are turned on the complainer rather than the person who has caused offense or damage.
I don't personally care if people want to boycott PAX or not. I already own a Dickwolf shirt, so I guess the "damage" in that regard is done. I'm not going to burn it or anything, because it's a reminder, still, of what happens when people take their shit and themselves way too seriously. However, really, it's not the same people that reminder started off with. Instead of learning something, everyone instead saw "WE ARE BEING ATTACKED. QUICK, FORM A GROUP TO FEEL LIKE IT'S A WAR FOR SOCIAL VALUES OR SOMETHING" rather than just skimming over the information and trying to learn something.
While the cries for boycotts and righteous screams for these guys' heads irritate me to no end, I find it less offensive than the people who try to pretend that they're some last ragged band of downtrodden heroes fighting against the PC Police or something. Mike and Jerry are the ones with power, here, and they have abused it in a fantastic fashion, over the course of this whole event. We get very wrapped up in trying to be contrarian (another shortcut for trying to look smart) when people claim injury or offense, and in that rush we forget that someone started it. PA was wrong to begin with, because while perhaps you can argue the comic was harmless, so was the response. Who did it hurt for people to say, "I think Penny Arcade promotes rape culture" when the people saying it were talking to themselves and had blogs with audiences numbering in the maybe-hundreds. Who did it hurt? Then who did it hurt when Mike went out of his way to mock and belittle those people on that and many later occasions. When PA as a group followed up with the comic that equated comments about rape culture to stating "You are making rapists!", a straw man so ludicrous that I'm shocked someone like Jerry let it go. They literally became the thing people were accusing them of at that point. And that's really all there is to it.
I mean, what I'm saying here is that I need a new name for my Facebox group.
But the steeled eye, the tight jaw, say it all.
The white paint, the plastic saints, say it all.
Somebody has got to say it all.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Dear Internet
Zack Snyder: Oh, hey, DC. It's been a long time. I've guess you've been... busy with... Christian Bale. I've been busy, too. I've been thinking about comic book movies, and the Batman IP, and I'm happy for you. I really am. Christian's a great guy. I mean, he's got a great jawline. I found someone with a good jawline, too. I don't know if you've heard, but... I'm casting Ben Affleck.
Ben Affleck: He's casting Ben Affleck.
Zack Snyder: While Christian's trilogy ended like shit? I'm casting Ben Affleck.
Ben Affleck: He said he's casting Ben Affleck. Hey, Christian, I've been in bigger hits.
Zack Snyder: You're not using that accent, though, right?
Ben Affleck: ... no...
Harley Quinn: Excuse me... is someone here... casting Ben Affleck?
Zack Snyder: I am! I'm casting him.
Harley Quinn: Great, doll. Sign here!
Zack Snyder: Thank you. (reading cake) "Screw Snyder, I Like Your Accent."
Ben Affleck: Aww.
Zack & Ben: When I made this choice, I had this feeling inside.
It's like a million angry nerds went home and died.
I love the Chicklets you call teeth, I see money in your eyes!
When I'm casting you, Ben Affleck, I feel like I don't have to try.
And this casting won't be stopped no matter how hard they cry.
Ben Affleck: They can't stop it.
Zack Snyder: They can't stop it!
Ben Affleck: He's casting Ben Affleck.
Zack Snyder: While Christian's trilogy ended like shit? I'm casting Ben Affleck.
Ben Affleck: He said he's casting Ben Affleck. Hey, Christian, I've been in bigger hits.
Zack Snyder: You're not using that accent, though, right?
Ben Affleck: ... no...
Harley Quinn: Excuse me... is someone here... casting Ben Affleck?
Zack Snyder: I am! I'm casting him.
Harley Quinn: Great, doll. Sign here!
Zack Snyder: Thank you. (reading cake) "Screw Snyder, I Like Your Accent."
Ben Affleck: Aww.
Zack & Ben: When I made this choice, I had this feeling inside.
It's like a million angry nerds went home and died.
I love the Chicklets you call teeth, I see money in your eyes!
When I'm casting you, Ben Affleck, I feel like I don't have to try.
And this casting won't be stopped no matter how hard they cry.
Ben Affleck: They can't stop it.
Zack Snyder: They can't stop it!
Friday, June 21, 2013
I Don't Think We Understand the Word "Victim"
So the whole deal with Microsoft, Killer Instinct, and E3 happened a week ago. A week in Internet time may as well been ten years prior, but I've been collecting my thoughts about this a little and I am a slow, slow person. I think it's worth taking a moment to see the fallout of something like this, not just to look at what Microsoft does in response (spoiler: it was not good), but also what people around me tend to think or how they act.
For those of you not wholly familiar: last week at the E3 conference, Microsoft trotted out some games and peripherals to dazzle convention attendees with. Among them was a new Killer Instinct title - a new edition of a fighting game largely known for crappy model interaction, inconsistent control, and exceptionally dull theme/flavor. It's like the love child of Mortal Kombat and Shaq Fu. People liked it a bit, though, because, well... c-c-c-c-ombo breaker? I really don't know, honestly. I think the first flag on the play here is that someone, somewhere in Microsoft's vast machine thought, "You know what people want? Killer Instinct!" and then someone else said, "Yes. I approve," and no one said as well, "I am so glad it's still the 90s!" Because if that last part was true, I'd understand.
Anyway, I digress. If you want to see the video again (or for the first time) here you go.
For those of you not wholly familiar: last week at the E3 conference, Microsoft trotted out some games and peripherals to dazzle convention attendees with. Among them was a new Killer Instinct title - a new edition of a fighting game largely known for crappy model interaction, inconsistent control, and exceptionally dull theme/flavor. It's like the love child of Mortal Kombat and Shaq Fu. People liked it a bit, though, because, well... c-c-c-c-ombo breaker? I really don't know, honestly. I think the first flag on the play here is that someone, somewhere in Microsoft's vast machine thought, "You know what people want? Killer Instinct!" and then someone else said, "Yes. I approve," and no one said as well, "I am so glad it's still the 90s!" Because if that last part was true, I'd understand.
Anyway, I digress. If you want to see the video again (or for the first time) here you go.
So, what's interesting here is really split into two things. You have the comment at about 0:37 that is the heart of the issue in this particular exhibition. But what I think is a little more telling is how the whole thing was framed, casual misogyny aside: the producer comes out well dressed and full of swagger and bravado to come beat up the frumpy Community Manager nerd. So let's break this down a little bit.
There's been a lot said in the past few years about what being a "real geek" is. It has, predictably, been thrown in the faces of women, primarily - the typical "fake nerd" assertion is leveled against an attractive woman who dares to look attractive in some fashion (and/or is cosplaying in some costume). She's told, repeatedly, that she's only in it for the easy male attention. It's usually not couched in terms as civil as that, though - it's usually "attention whore" and "dressing like a slut" and so on. There seems to be a great, impenetrable mass within the gaming community that simply looks at a woman in the territory and thinks she has to be an outsider by default. E3 reporters who are female shared a great many stories about how they were treated there.
On top of that, too, we have a general disdain for the "bro gamer". The typical guy we imagine on the other end of the CoD or Battlefield map - some guy in his khakis, a sideways visor, various necklaces or bracelets found in whatever same place Johnny Depp seems to get the damn things, chugging Mountain Dew and talking about how things are "sick, brah. Sick." Driving through a map of GT4, they may inquire: Bro, do you even shift? They're not real gamers either.
But, hilariously, which one are we far, far less likely to harass in person? At E3 or any similar convention? The women. We immediately assume they don't belong, having to pass any number of tests before we let it go (if we do at all), and the sad reality is that a great many folks would rather be the bro gamer. Especially in the fighting game communities (or generally any competitive community where there are "stars"), the people we see time and again tend to be cut from the same cloth over and over - the bro gamer shadow, effectively. They want to be like our friend the KI producer - sauntering on to stage, flipping out super badass one liners over and over, and totally sticking it to those nerds. This is not to say those groups are populated with 100% people like that - for every popped collar match, you see one fight between two dudes just sitting in a hotel chair just playing the game in a tournament fight, not acting like this.
So there's part of the problem. We tend to think we're badass when we're scorning other people or acting like the Alpha in the room - this isn't something unique to or inflated by gaming. The gaming community just seems to have an easier time finding outlets where this is accepted.
Coming back to the KI thing, I was not really surprised by the response people had to the comments, trying to dismiss the problem was there at all. It ranged from the predictably vulgar, like this comment from the video above - "So wait...the fucking Feminazi's overreacted over THIS? Good lord...those goddamn sexist manhaters need to stop complaining about everything."
... to the strangely accepting line of - "That's just playful banter and is how the FGC is, it's not 'sexist' or derogatory, and shouldn't be taken seriously at all."
That's the middle part of the same comment, btw. That guy was just shotgunning whatever reasons he could come up with to dismiss the idea something was wrong.
Because it was E3, the situation was also a little touchy, because several people noted that the whole thing was probably scripted. The CM got beat down pretty hard to begin with, but won the second match after she noted in the first one it was unfair the Producer had a fighting stick. Product placement to the extreme, plus the somewhat wooden, rhythmic way this dialogue was delivered makes it seem like this is likely. But that's not really a good thing, because (combined with the viewpoints above), there's only two logical scenarios, here:
1) Microsoft scripted that whole exchange, and is woefully ignorant of the message they sent. Trash talking is one thing, but "Just let it happen, it'll be over soon," is something else entirely. Look, I'll be blunt: I make horrific and tasteless jokes from time to time. But when I do so, it's in a context where I know the people I'm speaking to will understand these are only jokes. I don't do this and shake my fist at the damn oversensitive PC police or whatever. It's because I'm a fucking adult and realize that not everyone finds the same things funny, and in a similar vein to that - not everyone has had the same life experiences and thus might find different things offensive. I can accept that if I had said that in an open group full of people I don't know, someone might have said, "Dude, not cool," and I would have rolled with it. Apologized, even. It's not for me to say if I you do or do not have the right to be offended, because I don't know you. But, of course, that's not what happened.
2) If not scripted, then the other conclusion is that our friendly Producer felt empowered to make an off the cuff comment like that in front of thousands of people. Not because he is a horrible, rape-loving human being, but because he figured it's fine, comments like this get tossed out all the time. Look, I know we're getting a little fatigued of the phrase "rape culture", but if there's a moment that helps define it, here it is - when someone makes a joke that is unequivocally about rape*, and someone else says, "rape isn't funny," suddenly we have the person who made the joke trying to play the victim. Do we understand what the word "victim" means? You are not the victim if you said something callous - and the whole point of comments like these are to shit-talk your opponent - and someone gets upset. This is what rape culture is: the slow, steady propagation over time that comments like this need to be let go because stating your problem is "whining". Taking voices away from people who have a problem. That's the crux of it.
Now, of course, the ad absurdum argument here is, "Well, sure. I guess all the feminazis want to convince us that since he said that, everyone will think rape is ok!" Which, of course, once this particular straw man is established, ends rational discussion. The point is not just "rape is ok", it's belittling the feelings and worries of people who don't think like you. While talk like this doesn't lead to good people suddenly becoming an one-man pack of raping Mongols, it does teach women (or those who care about this issue at all) to keep their mouths shut or endure mocking and scorn. Where does that lead? Down a slow, but inevitable decline to the conclusion that it is their fault. That no one wants to hear it. That if they weren't so whiny, things would be fine. Which, of course, leads to people tolerating being the victim more and more by degrees.
The hilarious part is that you'll have people on one hand yell, "Oh god just stop whining!" and then out of the other, "If you women would stick up for yourselves, you wouldn't be such victims!" And they don't understand what this means to women, they're just trying to stand up for their perceived right to say or do whatever they want without being asked to adjust their behavior for the audience. And that's the critical failure - it's not about what's happening to you. It's about what's happening to them.
(*ps: This comment was unequivocally a rape joke. It was a joke about being raped, though not literally. You cannot be a reasonable human being and say otherwise, sorry.)
Wednesday, June 5, 2013
They Want Cash And Credit
So I'm going to bitch a little bit here, from a place of extreme privilege. Before I do that, I'll just say that I am both aware of and agree with Louis CK's rant a little while ago (the Russian is free, you're welcome) about how people like to complain about shit that is, in the end, still a damned miracle. So I get it, what I'm about to talk about crosses into that some, but I think from a rightfully irritated place.
I got a Galaxy S4 yesterday, and it is objectively an amazing piece of technology. It is much lighter and thinner than my previous smartphones (though a bit taller and wider, lacking a keyboard), and I was really sad to give up the physical keyboard. But progress marches ever forward, and at least I can still buy cars with manual transmission, so I will take my victories where I can find them. The S4 is an extremely anticipated phone (I'd say "was", but I'm certain everyone who is anticipating it has not yet gotten it) due to the amount of processing and entertainment power packed into the little sumbitch. It is, effectively, a small tablet at this point. The screen dominates the front in a way few other phones ever have been so dominated - most phones obviously surrender most of their frontal real estate to the screen, but this thing leaves room for very, very little else like borders or physical frontal buttons.
Honestly, I don't even use these things as a phone much anymore. I think I burned something to the tune of 60 talk minutes last month, and that was about average. I have an office phone for most of my work needs, and none of my friends seem willing to vocalize into their little Facebook/Camera/Text machine. I think my experience is not that unique, either - boards and communities are littered with posts about people focusing on the networking and accessory use of these phones. What does the car dock do? How easy is it to connect to Bluetooth machines? How much battery does the 4G radio burn? How crisp is the screen resolution? How quickly can it fire up and play games? And so on. Despite cell phone call audio quality not noticeably improving for the last five years, no one seems to really care.
So when a phone that people were getting all panty-soaked over fails in a few interesting ways along these lines, I wonder wtf is up. Rightly so, I think. I had a Droid 4, and a Droid before that. Before that, a Blackberry (one of the ones older than the Droid, I don't recall the model number). The Blackberry was my first real smartphone. So there's a little history for you to frame these things. What I felt was really neat about the Droid was an experience that most iPhone users took for granted but was very slow to evolve among the Android OS phones - integration. There were very few custom-built cases or holders or docks or whatever for particular Android phones. The Droid itself had these, of course, as they were the flagship phone of Droid and Motorola at the time. The Droid 2 and 3 and 4 all followed a similar pattern.
What these phones had going for them that I would later find was relatively unique was a focus on integration - the SmartActions in the Moto Android overlay allowed you to fire off a bunch of auto-commands based on certain conditions, making things feel seamless. Putting the phone into the car dock made it automatically recognize it was there. Turning on the Bluetooth just had it automatically try to connect to whatever paired device it had saved. All of these things can be reproduced, in some way, by various third party apps that I am having to monkey together, but by this point, it should be effectively standard. Why do I have to tell the S4 to connect to my car's bluetooth when I turn the BT on and it's the only possible connection? Why won't the crappy third-party car dock (the one I had to get because there's not one for the S4 specifically) trigger the car dock mode when it's not getting power through a car charger? What's with all these stupid green/black buttons on my drop down menu and why can't I get rid of the useless pieces of crap? Where is my damned on-off toggle for wifi? OH THERE IT IS, BURIED IN SOME CRAP.
Why doesn't the home screen have landscape mode, ffs. When a goddamned new phone or app does not have a landscape mode for the home screen, that, to me, is just shorthand for lazy crap.
What do I get in exchange for this poor attention to details that should be standard at this point? Well, there's Air Gestures, which is a neat gimmick but more of a marketing point than an actual useful feature. You wave your hand vaguely over the phone to make stuff stop or go. Answer the phone? Wave this way. Move a page, wave that way. You have to wave over the phone, so it's only barely more convenient than just reaching and hitting the button. Or, if you're reading something, guess what - the S4 is not a TV! You probably have the thing in front of your face anyway, so it's likely better to just move stuff normally, otherwise you look like you're batting at invisible flies. The flies are here! Air Gestures will train people for a year or so (before moving on to their next phone) to constantly make airy, dismissive gestures in front of them to make things go away. Samsung is aiding and abetting douchebag behavior.
There are other uses for Air Gestures, to be sure. But, like most weird, niche movement recognition interfaces, I'd wager 99% of the population using these things has no use for them.
And you do get the Smart Whatever Thing. The thing that reads if your eyes are on the screen. You can train the thing to stop playing a video if you look away. You can make it follow your eyes and scroll text when you read down. I have to hit 20 buttons to make my phone connect to my car now, when it used to be as easy as setting it in the dock, but at least now Chrome knows what part of that Christina Hendricks photo I'm looking at.
But then, I'm sure it always knew.
I guess my irritation is that it feels a little weird when you take it all together. Are you targeting this phone at the superuser? Then it's missing a lot of features that are pretty much standard now. Are you targeting the phone at casual users? Then it's got way too much shit on it. Half of these apps are just "Hey I Don't Know How to Organize Photos and My Social Media Is Super Hard, Samsung, Do It For Me Thanks" variants of whatever shape and size.
It's still a great phone, as they go. The fact I can boot it up in under 15 seconds, hit a few buttons, and stream an exceptionally clear re-run of 30 Rock is amazing. When you think of how complex the process of delivering that is, it is literally amazing. But the phone is not billed as "A fucking miracle pressed into a small case, you better fucking love it," it's the "most anticipated phone of the year" and "a symbol of cutting edge technology and convenience." I mean, if I got a car that didn't come with power locks or windows, I'd be a little confused but I'd understand that shit is not technically standard. But if I was sitting in a $60,000 Porsche and had to ask how to roll the windows down, it's a whole other deal.
What Samsung has done is sold me on a Porsche that has manual windows, but instead of that, I get a customized apple-corer in the dashboard. For all the apples their marketing folks think I probably eat.
I got a Galaxy S4 yesterday, and it is objectively an amazing piece of technology. It is much lighter and thinner than my previous smartphones (though a bit taller and wider, lacking a keyboard), and I was really sad to give up the physical keyboard. But progress marches ever forward, and at least I can still buy cars with manual transmission, so I will take my victories where I can find them. The S4 is an extremely anticipated phone (I'd say "was", but I'm certain everyone who is anticipating it has not yet gotten it) due to the amount of processing and entertainment power packed into the little sumbitch. It is, effectively, a small tablet at this point. The screen dominates the front in a way few other phones ever have been so dominated - most phones obviously surrender most of their frontal real estate to the screen, but this thing leaves room for very, very little else like borders or physical frontal buttons.
Honestly, I don't even use these things as a phone much anymore. I think I burned something to the tune of 60 talk minutes last month, and that was about average. I have an office phone for most of my work needs, and none of my friends seem willing to vocalize into their little Facebook/Camera/Text machine. I think my experience is not that unique, either - boards and communities are littered with posts about people focusing on the networking and accessory use of these phones. What does the car dock do? How easy is it to connect to Bluetooth machines? How much battery does the 4G radio burn? How crisp is the screen resolution? How quickly can it fire up and play games? And so on. Despite cell phone call audio quality not noticeably improving for the last five years, no one seems to really care.
So when a phone that people were getting all panty-soaked over fails in a few interesting ways along these lines, I wonder wtf is up. Rightly so, I think. I had a Droid 4, and a Droid before that. Before that, a Blackberry (one of the ones older than the Droid, I don't recall the model number). The Blackberry was my first real smartphone. So there's a little history for you to frame these things. What I felt was really neat about the Droid was an experience that most iPhone users took for granted but was very slow to evolve among the Android OS phones - integration. There were very few custom-built cases or holders or docks or whatever for particular Android phones. The Droid itself had these, of course, as they were the flagship phone of Droid and Motorola at the time. The Droid 2 and 3 and 4 all followed a similar pattern.
What these phones had going for them that I would later find was relatively unique was a focus on integration - the SmartActions in the Moto Android overlay allowed you to fire off a bunch of auto-commands based on certain conditions, making things feel seamless. Putting the phone into the car dock made it automatically recognize it was there. Turning on the Bluetooth just had it automatically try to connect to whatever paired device it had saved. All of these things can be reproduced, in some way, by various third party apps that I am having to monkey together, but by this point, it should be effectively standard. Why do I have to tell the S4 to connect to my car's bluetooth when I turn the BT on and it's the only possible connection? Why won't the crappy third-party car dock (the one I had to get because there's not one for the S4 specifically) trigger the car dock mode when it's not getting power through a car charger? What's with all these stupid green/black buttons on my drop down menu and why can't I get rid of the useless pieces of crap? Where is my damned on-off toggle for wifi? OH THERE IT IS, BURIED IN SOME CRAP.
Why doesn't the home screen have landscape mode, ffs. When a goddamned new phone or app does not have a landscape mode for the home screen, that, to me, is just shorthand for lazy crap.
What do I get in exchange for this poor attention to details that should be standard at this point? Well, there's Air Gestures, which is a neat gimmick but more of a marketing point than an actual useful feature. You wave your hand vaguely over the phone to make stuff stop or go. Answer the phone? Wave this way. Move a page, wave that way. You have to wave over the phone, so it's only barely more convenient than just reaching and hitting the button. Or, if you're reading something, guess what - the S4 is not a TV! You probably have the thing in front of your face anyway, so it's likely better to just move stuff normally, otherwise you look like you're batting at invisible flies. The flies are here! Air Gestures will train people for a year or so (before moving on to their next phone) to constantly make airy, dismissive gestures in front of them to make things go away. Samsung is aiding and abetting douchebag behavior.
There are other uses for Air Gestures, to be sure. But, like most weird, niche movement recognition interfaces, I'd wager 99% of the population using these things has no use for them.
And you do get the Smart Whatever Thing. The thing that reads if your eyes are on the screen. You can train the thing to stop playing a video if you look away. You can make it follow your eyes and scroll text when you read down. I have to hit 20 buttons to make my phone connect to my car now, when it used to be as easy as setting it in the dock, but at least now Chrome knows what part of that Christina Hendricks photo I'm looking at.
But then, I'm sure it always knew.
I guess my irritation is that it feels a little weird when you take it all together. Are you targeting this phone at the superuser? Then it's missing a lot of features that are pretty much standard now. Are you targeting the phone at casual users? Then it's got way too much shit on it. Half of these apps are just "Hey I Don't Know How to Organize Photos and My Social Media Is Super Hard, Samsung, Do It For Me Thanks" variants of whatever shape and size.
It's still a great phone, as they go. The fact I can boot it up in under 15 seconds, hit a few buttons, and stream an exceptionally clear re-run of 30 Rock is amazing. When you think of how complex the process of delivering that is, it is literally amazing. But the phone is not billed as "A fucking miracle pressed into a small case, you better fucking love it," it's the "most anticipated phone of the year" and "a symbol of cutting edge technology and convenience." I mean, if I got a car that didn't come with power locks or windows, I'd be a little confused but I'd understand that shit is not technically standard. But if I was sitting in a $60,000 Porsche and had to ask how to roll the windows down, it's a whole other deal.
What Samsung has done is sold me on a Porsche that has manual windows, but instead of that, I get a customized apple-corer in the dashboard. For all the apples their marketing folks think I probably eat.
Thursday, May 9, 2013
This One Was Inevitable
So I'm just going to rant a little bit.
Given the concentration of money and privileged, generationally insulated folks in this area, I have (no joke) been quietly trying very hard not to get irritated at some of the shit I am seeing. I am already tired from travel and working while trying to see this city, going nonstop. So I know that part of it is just my relatively short temper at the moment. But god damnit people, listen to your fucking selves for just five minutes.
Kim and I were at some cutesy little corner Italian sidewalk cafe tonight, and I could not get past the nexus of entitlement and self-absorption I sat in the middle of. On one side of us was a table of thirty-something folks who had two Italian guys (or at least Italian speakers) with them. They were certain every word that came out of their mouth was just glazed in the well-won wisdom of world travel and deep experience. Except they were saying retarded, unfunny and unoriginal shit with a smugness and gravity that the actual content simply did not have. But, of course, they were worldly people who had such lengthy opinions about anything, and of course they really knew about wine and food. They were condescendingly patient with the woman they had with them, as well as the waitress.
I don't mind that the waitress had to deal with their shit, more on that in a minute.
To the other side, about ten minutes after we sat down, a trio of privileged little yuppie kids sat down, loudly proclaiming that everything is (literally) just the best ever!!! or oh god that is the worst. Louis CK has a good riff on people devaluing the shit out of expressive words, where people slowly and boringly describe something mundane as "sooo hilarious". This was in the similar vein, except this little ginger chick was super fucking animated about everything - with her tone, anyway. Everything is the most whatever. The most, man! The sneering tanned kid tried to trump her from time to time, and the token gay guy would just add in the occasional shriek and/or "omg yes, yes, yes I KNOW" or just a series of "MmmHMMMM, yes, I knooooowww," shit that is simply the stock filler line of any Bravo reality show.
I cannot stand people like this. Listening to the vapid, useless shit these kids talked about in their prescribed catalog fashions while they tried really hard to be the most interesting and dramatic person at the table - nay, the whole city block within earshot - just made me frown pretty deeply. These are people who look at the little airy, cardboard people on the CW or in "fashion lifestyle" bullshit publications and dive in headfirst into thinking that is life. They don't have an identity, they're renting it until a newer one comes out in a season or two.
Hilariously - and I do mean hilarious in this context - a party bus full of drunken women passed the intersection, and one of them rolled down a window to scream "I LOOOOVEE ROCK AND ROLL". The girl of this trio that had spawned whole from the forehead of a Vodka commercial rolled her eyes and sighed out, "Vapid whores." Yes, absolutely. Vapid whores. How dare they interrupt her super fascinating dissertation on exactly why the Great Gatsby is the best ever or how this vintage Atari is the coolest thing ever. Why are these things the most X ever? Let me go ahead and truncate this for you, you trifecta of tittering twats - they are the best and coolest because someone just told you it was the new shit. Great Gatsby? It's a book, I guess, right? Some movie just came out, but it's a movie about old things and classy-looking shit, thus you are deep and classy cuz you like it. And Atari? Well, that's a nerd thing, and we all know how cool it is to like the nerd things now (it makes you part of a secret club!!!!).
I don't know these folks, but what kills me the most is that their view of everything was so simple, so superficial, and so quickly formed. They'll grow up with their parents money, never really understanding how the problems of the world happen. Poverty? Well, obviously that's either just a string of bad luck or due to people being lazy and not wanting to work. The idea that there are generational systems and biases in place across race, gender, location, and existing income is just one or twenty levels of play too deep for these guys.
Or, possibly worse, something terrible might happen to them. That's another facet of the overall tragedy. These folks were 20-something, way past the age where most people absorb new information and change their views or their behavior without catastrophic change. Something terrible will have to happen to them for them to examine how the world - and their corner of it - works. That's where we are as a society, we have to punish people into becoming better at a certain point.
It's, like, the worst. Ever.
Given the concentration of money and privileged, generationally insulated folks in this area, I have (no joke) been quietly trying very hard not to get irritated at some of the shit I am seeing. I am already tired from travel and working while trying to see this city, going nonstop. So I know that part of it is just my relatively short temper at the moment. But god damnit people, listen to your fucking selves for just five minutes.
Kim and I were at some cutesy little corner Italian sidewalk cafe tonight, and I could not get past the nexus of entitlement and self-absorption I sat in the middle of. On one side of us was a table of thirty-something folks who had two Italian guys (or at least Italian speakers) with them. They were certain every word that came out of their mouth was just glazed in the well-won wisdom of world travel and deep experience. Except they were saying retarded, unfunny and unoriginal shit with a smugness and gravity that the actual content simply did not have. But, of course, they were worldly people who had such lengthy opinions about anything, and of course they really knew about wine and food. They were condescendingly patient with the woman they had with them, as well as the waitress.
I don't mind that the waitress had to deal with their shit, more on that in a minute.
To the other side, about ten minutes after we sat down, a trio of privileged little yuppie kids sat down, loudly proclaiming that everything is (literally) just the best ever!!! or oh god that is the worst. Louis CK has a good riff on people devaluing the shit out of expressive words, where people slowly and boringly describe something mundane as "sooo hilarious". This was in the similar vein, except this little ginger chick was super fucking animated about everything - with her tone, anyway. Everything is the most whatever. The most, man! The sneering tanned kid tried to trump her from time to time, and the token gay guy would just add in the occasional shriek and/or "omg yes, yes, yes I KNOW" or just a series of "MmmHMMMM, yes, I knooooowww," shit that is simply the stock filler line of any Bravo reality show.
I cannot stand people like this. Listening to the vapid, useless shit these kids talked about in their prescribed catalog fashions while they tried really hard to be the most interesting and dramatic person at the table - nay, the whole city block within earshot - just made me frown pretty deeply. These are people who look at the little airy, cardboard people on the CW or in "fashion lifestyle" bullshit publications and dive in headfirst into thinking that is life. They don't have an identity, they're renting it until a newer one comes out in a season or two.
Hilariously - and I do mean hilarious in this context - a party bus full of drunken women passed the intersection, and one of them rolled down a window to scream "I LOOOOVEE ROCK AND ROLL". The girl of this trio that had spawned whole from the forehead of a Vodka commercial rolled her eyes and sighed out, "Vapid whores." Yes, absolutely. Vapid whores. How dare they interrupt her super fascinating dissertation on exactly why the Great Gatsby is the best ever or how this vintage Atari is the coolest thing ever. Why are these things the most X ever? Let me go ahead and truncate this for you, you trifecta of tittering twats - they are the best and coolest because someone just told you it was the new shit. Great Gatsby? It's a book, I guess, right? Some movie just came out, but it's a movie about old things and classy-looking shit, thus you are deep and classy cuz you like it. And Atari? Well, that's a nerd thing, and we all know how cool it is to like the nerd things now (it makes you part of a secret club!!!!).
I don't know these folks, but what kills me the most is that their view of everything was so simple, so superficial, and so quickly formed. They'll grow up with their parents money, never really understanding how the problems of the world happen. Poverty? Well, obviously that's either just a string of bad luck or due to people being lazy and not wanting to work. The idea that there are generational systems and biases in place across race, gender, location, and existing income is just one or twenty levels of play too deep for these guys.
Or, possibly worse, something terrible might happen to them. That's another facet of the overall tragedy. These folks were 20-something, way past the age where most people absorb new information and change their views or their behavior without catastrophic change. Something terrible will have to happen to them for them to examine how the world - and their corner of it - works. That's where we are as a society, we have to punish people into becoming better at a certain point.
It's, like, the worst. Ever.
My Private Life is an Inside Joke
 |
| You can just smell the seething white guilt. |
But enough balanced introspection, let's make fun of hipsters and West Coast liberals.
Pretty much as soon as we (Kim and I) landed, I was struck with how open and airy everything is. And I am not strictly speaking of buildings and various constructs across the city. Portland is physically very appealing to me - there are trees smashed into everything, and pedestrian/bike traffic is encouraged everywhere. But the cross messages of everyone both proclaiming how welcoming/open they are at the same time trying to pin down exactly what it is they like/value/accept is hilarious. There are so many shades of "accept me! value me! envy me!" that it kills me. It really is like some sort of extended caricature of hipster-ism.
There, that's out of the way. It's true, by the way, every bit of the above. I'm not trying to do the thing where an observer points out the obvious issues and then tries to turn everything on its head by appreciating it anyway unabashedly (and to stir fake controversy). I just wanted to point that out but not dwell on it because, fortunately, I've managed to enjoy it all as a tourist. On Sunday, we checked in at the Waterfront and walked a bit along the park on the river.
During a stop at a bistro (edit: sorry, GASTROPUB) having some local wine and locally-sourced farm fed herp herp herp food, a woman bikes past on a vintage fixed gear bike. In a wide brim white hat. And white sundress. And comically large sunglasses. With her little doggie riding in a custom made basket. And she wasn't so much pedaling as posing with her head tilted away, trying hard to look whimsical and carefree as she nearly ran into five or six people, one at a time, because she wasn't looking where she was going.
I will forever know this woman, in my heart, as the Spirit of Portland. Pretty, intentionally too quirky, basically alright and harmless, trying a little too hard... but in the end, probably pretty friendly and someone you'd wanna have around for a drink or interesting chat.
The beer here has been, so far, overstated. Portland was said to be the Beervana of the Northwest by several sources, and all I can think is that perhaps I am not running into the right microbrews. Maybe I need to find the micro-micro-brews, you know... the ones you haven't heard of? I dunno. The beer here hasn't been bad, just disappointing after all the hype. To be fair, it was a lot of hype, so it's unlikely any place can live up to that mess. I have some pictures I'll put up later about the breweries I visited, but so far I haven't found anything I'd try to get back home.
Class itself has been both hilarious and terrible, as these training sessions tend to be. They're usually full of people who are far, far too interested in properly representing oneself as a srs bsnss counselor and avenger of the people in both conversation and discussing intent, but few people seem to have any real grasp of what counseling and program execution is actually about. It's more important to rant about those damn banks and how horribly unfair X and Y is rather than actually talk about how to fix it, how to serve clients, or how to make an effective program.
In short, whenever I feel like I am too wrapped up in anger and worry if I am competent/skilled enough for my job, I always find strong reaffirmation in these classes. While I learn relatively little, that bit of motivation is usually pretty helpful. Though the sad and depressing realization that these folks represent the majority of the counseling community is deeply depressing for a little while after.
So far, I've avoided spending too much money on the little specialty boutique whoosit shops, which I'm happy with. You know the shops - the ones that seem to base their business model not on actual solvency, but asking themselves the question, "Hey, if someone walked into my shop, would they think 'oh wow look at all the needlessly complex and expensive variations on this relatively simple product that really doesn't actually need multiple iterations!'?"
Cuz these places are every damn where. It seems less important to have a good business, but instead a business that people can say "omg that's so clever!" when referring to the material at hand. Of course, living in Austin, this is a phenomenon I am deeply familiar with, but the number of these sorts of stores is staggering.
On a sour note, it just feels like you have somewhat creative and interesting people no longer interested in being actually clever and advancing art or improving the world. They just walk to talk to each other and compliment each other on how fresh and hip their vapid, shallow idea is and then discard it to move on to the next vapid and shallow cutesy trend to set. These folks, I think, decided to introduce the term "taste maker" because "trend-setter" was too disturbingly accurate in painting just how shallow and useless their efforts were. These are the folks who think blogging and tweeting is a real job that makes them super interesting, I guess.
...I say on my blog. I guess I exempt myself because I feel like I contribute.
Anyway, I'll wrap this one up before it gets too bitter. Portland is, despite my mini-rants, actually A++, would visit again, and I've got three more days here so far. The layout of the city, the public transportation, the shops, the region, the architecture, everything. My main complaint is the people, but I think genetics are kicking in and I will hate everyone eventually anyway while still trying to cheer them on and love everyone so.. yeah. Not Portland's fault, there.
More brews and $300 vintage tie reports later.
Sold my tortured youth, piss and vinegar
I'm still angry with no reason to be
At the architect who imagines
For the every man, blessed sisyphus
Slipping steadily into madness, now that's the only place to be free
I'm still angry with no reason to be
At the architect who imagines
For the every man, blessed sisyphus
Slipping steadily into madness, now that's the only place to be free
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