It’s chilly and dark and very, very quiet so I think I’ll just write about me for a bit. A few months back, I wrote about how the source of my chronic health concerns had been identified and that I was on the mend. In the (unseasonably) cold light of morning, I am forced to conclude that I was being a bit too optimistic. I’m not dying, at least, I’m not dying any more than the average person is on a daily basis. I am, however, growing discouraged. I’m not a winter person to begin with, and when you combine the longer nights with the constant discomfort and aesthetically unfortunate nature of my condition…I’m not going to lie. It gets me down sometimes. That said, I’ll be seeing a very good doctor in a couple of days and I am confident that we’ll be able to treat the symptoms aggressively even if we don’t move any closer to a resolution. I have family visiting soon. I can’t believe it’s been five years since I’ve spent any amount of time with them, although it may be that I’ll remember why I haven’t seen them once we’re in close quarters. I love this time of night. I love the quiet of it. I love that I can think and even concentrate without the constant interruptions and noise and people and noise and phones and noise and….you get the idea. I’ve had to work in shared workspace environments in the past. I can say with authority that “shared workspace” offices aren’t the way to go if you want to produce anything but stress. This time of night is nice. I ought to do this more often. -Ridley
Author: Ridley
Of Straw Men and Middlemen
I’ve been meaning to write something about Interstellar since seeing it on Saturday, but I feel like I need to see it again before committing to anything. It’s a complicated, frustrating movie, and it isn’t exactly the film I thought I was going to be seeing, so I’d like to see it again before committing to anything. I know I should let this go, but Mr. Scalzi posted three more tweets in defense of “middlemen” and they’ve been stuck in the forefront of my thoughts ever sense. Here’s what he had to say: My initial reaction was “Does the word ‘middleman’ even mean what I think it means? I’ve been terribly wrong about words I thought I knew, so I checked the ol’ dictionary and came up with this: “mid·dle·manˈmidlˌman/Submitnounnoun: middle-mana person who buys goods from producers and sells them to retailers or consumers. ”we aim to maintain value for money by cutting out the middleman and selling direct”” Ok, that’s pretty much exactly what I had been thinking. Anyone who adds value to the product is, by definition, not a “middleman.” The middleman doesn’t enter the equation until after whatever you’re selling has been proofed, edited, typset, etc. The book is finished by the time the middleman enters the equation. Now, I know approximately nothing about business of publishing.. I don’t know how cleanly you can make the distinction between “middleman” and “not-middleman.” I know that, in the music industry, when you talk about “middlemen,” you’re talking about the major labels, distributors, wholesalers, and your retailers like Peaches and Tower and most especially Wal-Mart. I’m guessing these aren’t the types of middlemen that Scalzi is defending. I think we’re just talking past each other. I think we’re just taking two different meanings of the word “middleman” and talking about two very different industries (as the discussion was originally about music). I hope that’s the case. He doesn’t seem like the sort to go off the handle when his fans are trying to say “I wish more of the purchase price went to the people who actually worked on the books you write.” OK, enough on this. I happen to love John Scalzi’s work (the first e-book I purchased was one of his), I love his tweets, and I love reading his blog. We differ on this issue and I could well be in the wrong. I just couldn’t get it out of my head until I put it down on something paper-ish.
In which I sound more flip on Twitter than I meant to
Earlier this afternoon, John Scalzi posted this on his Twitter feed: I agree wholeheartedly (I have paid for all of the music in my collection that wasn’t given to me as a gift) and responded with: @scalzi Would always prefer to buy, and if directly from the artist if possible. Hate paying toll to middlemen who abuse artists and fans. To which he responded: @MrRidleyKemp The “middlemen” I work with are people who do work I don’t want to do, better than I could. I want them paid, too. Ouch. Ok, it’s a fair enough comment because I didn’t specify that I wasn’t talking about publishing in general or him specifically there. I know approximately nothing about the publishing business. I know enough people working as writers and editors to know that publishing is really, really different than the music business. And the music business? I know something about that one. I worked in it, on the non-creative side, off and on for most of a decade. I have a reasonable handle on the economics of the business and I can say with some degree of authority that the middlemen absolutely abused their position for a very long time, taking advantage of both artists and fans alike. Back in ye olden times, in the days of recorded music before there was an internet, creating playable recordings of music and distributing them had a prohibitively high cost of entry. Only a few companies could do it economically. This meant that, for artists wanting to market their music, there were very few options available. It in no way resembled what we think of as a “market.” Similarly, these companies had a monopoly on selling these recordings. It was a non-competitive situation on both ends, and the companies milked the situation to an abusive degree. The price of the recordings,of course, was “whatever the market will bear”, but the cut that went to the artist was absurdly small because the artists had no choice but to enter into these one-sided deals. This generated ill-will among artists who rightly felt abused, and didn’t exactly make the fans happy since only a tiny portion of their purchase price was going to support the part of the whole supply chain they were wanting to support. Then the internet happened. Suddenly, the “production” and “distribution” costs went to a fraction of what they’d been. That part of the equation went from being a necessary evil to being something that could be bypassed completely (the fact that the music could also be illegally copied and shared at no cost and very little risk of retribution plays a part too, but that’s another story). It was now possible to make an album every bit as good, using the same personnel, the same producer, the same engineer, the same everything except for company that stamps out the plastic disks and the big box retailer racking them, and it could be sold at a larger profit to the people who made the music and a lower cost to the people who wanted to buy it. This is what I was trying to say in my 140 characters. I didn’t mean to belittle his choices, about which he knows approximately 10000000x more than I ever will. And I don’t want to cut out the editors, the agents, the managers, the typesetters, or any of the people involved in making a book better any more than I’d want to cut out anyone involved in making a record better. Hell, I don’t even want to cut out a middleman that the artist happens to like and wants to support. Like I said, I buy all of my music. But, given a choice, I’ll choose to purchase in whatever way most benefits the artists as opposed to, say, WEA and Wal-Mart.
Voting Because It Matters
The more local an election is, the greater importance of your vote. I know it’s much sexier to vote in state-wide or national elections. It’s easier to get worked up against the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, which is to say, Your Party versus the Other Party, as represented by two candidates on a national ballot. I get caught up in it as much as anyone. Unfortunately, your vote doesn’t really matter very much in a national election. It just doesn’t. Even in Wyoming, the state where individual votes have the greatest impact on an election (thanks, electoral college!), your vote is a literal drop in a bucket. Not only that, but the folks you’re voting for only represent you in the most abstract of senses. You are not at the top of their mind when they’re doing whatever Presidents or Senators do on a daily basis. There’s too many of “you” and too few of “them” for any sort of real representation to occur. At the other end of the spectrum, you have your local elections. Your city council members represent a few thousand people rather than tens of millions. The bond issues affect you and yours on a daily basis. The school board (you do elect your school board, don’t you?) makes decisions that can affect your children’s entire lives. These are very close, very immediate concerns. The best part is that your vote can actually make a difference in these elections. In a national election, coming within a few million votes is considered a close race, whereas a few hundred votes can produce a landslide in a local election. I won’t be writing about political things very often, but I’ll make an exception today. I urge you, if you haven’t already, please get out and vote today. It might actually make a difference.
Brill Bruisers Visited
I’ll let you in on a dirty little secret of mine: I am convinced that pop/rock music reached it’s pinnacle in the 2000’s. I suspect this isn’t the majority opinion, particularly among people of my generation who grew up on seventies rock bleeding into punk and new wave. The music I grew up with will always be special to me, but I can’t remember any era as exciting to me as the first decade of the millennium. Even if several of my favorite acts, like The Futureheads, Stellastarr*, The Hives, The Kaiser Chiefs, MGMT, and the late, lamented Ambulance, LTD didn’t have the long, successful runs they deserved, bands like Metric, The Arcade Fire, Ted Leo + Pharmacists, and especially The New Pornographers** turned out great record after great record during the aughts. We’re well out of the 00’s now, but The New Pornographers have just released yet another album that one could argue is their best yet. I was chuffed from the get-go about this one. Carl Newman has always done a brilliant job describing the influences on their upcoming albums and this one was the most evocative yet: “We wanted Xanadu and we wanted Sigue Sigue Sputnik, which translated into sparklier and faster [music].” If that doesn’t get you excited, then you have different tastes in music than I do. After several listens, start to finish, I think it’s safe to say they hit the target. This is the most uptempo album they’ve made since The Electric Version. It’s easily the the brightest record they’ve ever made. Sure, it sparkles, but it rocks as well. Check out “Backstairs”, which is probably the best ELO song ever made. Unfortunately, it’s not on Youtube yet, so you’ll have to use a little ingenuity to dig it up. You know, like “buying it” or something. * The asterisk is actually part of the band’s name. ** The videos are kind of great, so it’s worth clicking on all three.
Speaking Subjecvtively About Gamergate
I am sick of #Gamergate. The idea that abusing women for, well, really for just being women is somehow acceptable behavior is mortifying. Fortunately, the backlash has been a good deal stronger (not to mention more rational) than the actual Gamergate movement. Better writers than I have dismantled the rationalizations behind Gamergate and I consider the matter settled, at least in the public arena. The fight’s not over by a long shot, but I feel like the right side has the momentum now. So, I’m not going to try to rehash the arguments. Instead, I’d like to share my personal reaction to the debacle. I don’t know Zoe Quinn or Eron Gjoni; I have, however, read a good deal of what Gjoni wrote about Quinn after their relationship ended. It felt painfully familiar to me. I’m not proud of that. I’ve written things after ugly breakups that I’m not proud of and reading TheZoePost reminded me of a great deal I’d rather forget. I remember, more than once, writing at great length about exes, listing all manner of wrongs done to me over the course of the relationship: lies, cheating, manipulation, abuse, and I’m sure there were more. I’m not inclined to re-read them, so I’m going off of memory here. There were elements of truth in them, some wild exaggerations and distortions, as well as some things that I simply imagined. I was warning other people, trying to paint myself as a victim and a hero. I wasn’t in a good place. The worst of it was that it was all coming from me lashing out at the fact that I felt I’d done everything right and she didn’t react properly. I wasn’t hurt by the cheating or lies or manipulation; I was hurt that I’d been the “good” one and she was still leaving me. At least, that’s how my bleeding psyche insisted on seeing itself. It was all bullshit, of course. I was furious because the woman didn’t react in the mechanistic way I felt she should have. She was her own goals, her own desires, her own drives. She was a person, not a thing. Like I said, I’m not proud of my actions here. So, when I read Eron’s writing, I can’t help be feel he’s coming from a similar place. That’s just me projecting, but his words certainly feel familiar to me. As for the army that was mustered by TheZoePost? They’re the unfettered Id of that wounded version of myself. They cannot bear the idea of women as people, especially women who criticize the masturbatory fantasies they have of themselves as heroes. The MRA’s, the PUA’s, and the GamerGaters are peas in a pod. From this angle, it looks like they haven’t outgrown the view of woman-as-object and they’re threatened by anything that pushes back against their worldview. Fortunately, it feels like there is more and more of that pushback. Not enough, but it’s a start. I’m unequivocally, unreservedly, unapologetically against Gamergate.
Mobile post test
I’m writing this in my phone’s tiny keyboard to make sure I get how this app works. A picnic seemed like a better idea than scrounging at home and we’ve been rewarded with an absurdly warn and mild fall-ish evening The guys at the table across the lawn are speaking French and absent-mindedly kicking a soccer ball around, cigarettes hanging from their mouths. Behind us, there’s a bearded fellow giving bullwhip lessons to a woman. Both are dressed for a serious without and, from the looks of it, that’s exactly what it is. We’re on a little blanket, a plate of fruit, cheese, and bread between us, enjoying the pre-dusk and some decent cider. There are worse ways to spend a day, eh?
5 into 7
I’m currently working on moving my site from Squarespace v5 to v7. The new version is a real pleasure to work with, but the transfer did unspeakable things to the formatting of old posts. I don’t know when/if I’ll get to fixing those, but I am aware of the issue and I’ll try to address is when/if I have the time and energy.
Spoiler Alert
We watched The Sixth Sense again the other night as part of our “scary movie October” series and I was surprised to discover I enjoyed it a great deal more than I did when I first saw it. That sounds a little counter-intuitive, doesn’t it? The Sixth Sense is one of great twist-ending films of its time, so you’d think that knowing what was coming would render the whole thing ineffective. Instead, I found myself admiring the clever ways in which the twist ending was set up, the trail of breadcrumbs left for the viewer if only they’d know to follow them. Shyamalan did an admirable job, almost completely avoiding easy cheats in setting up the story. The fact that I could relax and enjoy the story instead of spending the entire time trying to puzzle out what was going on only made it better. I had a similar experience watching The Crying Game a second time. It’s a completely different experience when you know what’s going to happen and, for me, a superior experience. You can appreciate how much fun Neil Jordan is having, playing with the viewers and almost daring them not to figure it out the first time through. Even the soundtrack gives the movie away, but only if you’ve already seen it. My only caveat is that it doesn’t apply as reliably when the movie is poorly made. If you watch a poorly-constructed surprise-ending film a second time, you’re likely to be hung up on how clumsily the director cheats and hides his secret behind unlikely coincidences or unbelievable contrivances. It turns out that there’s actual, real-life research on this subject which backs up my experience. There’s a little comfort in knowing I’m not the only one. I feel ever-so-slightly less alien this way.
Delphinidae-esque
One of the weird little pleasure of public transportation is watching the cyclists on the path next to the train tracks riding alongside the train as it approaches the station. I’m not quite sure why it pleases me so much to see this, but I look forward to it every morning.