Continue reading »]]> The Office ended yesterday — unlike Community, this one I’m sure is over.  I have a lot of feelings about it, and I’m not totally sure how to put them together.

When I started watching the Office, Steve Carell had already left the show.  He’d been gone for a while, actually — I pretty much only caught the last season, live.  Everything before that was Netflix and Hulu.  I caught up to the present as I was reading and hearing commenters on the internet complaining about how much the show had gone downhill.

I felt strongly about the show’s end.  I thought it was good that it was ending, that they decided to end it and do a final season, for real, not just keep pushing till they got cancelled.  I think that’s important because if they hadn’t, the show would probably have closed with Jim still working as a salesperson, Pam still working as the office manager, Dwight still assembling ill-wrought power grabs, and generally everyone feeling unfulfilled and a little empty.

The way it ended — the fact that it ended — says something important about the story of the Office.  It says that the experience of the people who worked at Dunder Mifflin was a journey, with growth and change and progress, rather than a Sisyphean grind — or, worse than that, a struggle against relevance and into obscurity.

I have more thoughts, but I’m not really sure what to do with them.  And, also, this post doesn’t have any spoilers in it, so I’m going to leave it off here.

Continue reading »]]> Esther Inglis-Arkell at io9 posted an article called An experiment shows how people deliberately sabotage themselves, in which she explains that self-sabotage is not a subconscious impulse, but a clear, conscious decision:

Two researchers, Edward Jones and Steven Berglas, asked students to take a test. They pretended to score the test and happily told the students that they’d got ten a perfect score. This had to have come as good – and somewhat surprising – news to the students, who were then asked to take another test.

Before they took this second test, they were asked to take their choice of two different drugs. Both were perfectly legal, the researchers assured the students. One was designed to improve academic performance. The other was designed to lower it. Guess which ones the students overwhelmingly chose.

She writes about being “[S]o anxious to impress someone that we don’t want to say anything wrong – and so we don’t say anything at all, which is hardly impressive,” which is a super-familiar sentiment to me.  I remember in particular one time, I think in 2009, when I met Neil Gaiman, and I deliberately tried as hard as I could not to make any sort of impression, because I was terrified that he’d remember me a decade later and think I was an ass.

Self-sabotage can be a conscious experience.  I don’t want to say it always is, but I’ve never experienced it being a weird, inexplicable action that I could only make sense of far, far later.  It’s more like  a horrible sense of dissonance between what I want and what I know my brain is about to do.  Like that word vomit scene in Mean Girls.  It’s something I talk to my therapist about.

Continue reading »]]> Alan Moore is a great writer, and it’s a lot of fun to watch him talking about the craft of writing.  The reason I think it’s fun is because he takes it very seriously, and I’m generally pretty sure he’s right.  Not about the metaphysics, because he thinks writing is literally magic, but about all the stuff that his metaphysics implies.

In the interview, Moore said:  ”In my — probably somewhat extreme — opinion, to stop is death.  The death of creativity.  To decide that you’re satisfied with what you are doing, that is when you are probably finished as a writer.”

I can’t think of a time, ever, when I’ve heard a successful writer say anything resembling “Don’t worry, eventually you’ll get used to it and it will be easy from then on.”  The most consistent advice that comes out seems to be that if you work as hard as you can, your reward is that the work gets a little harder.

So, I’m looking forward to that.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve read the Great Gatsby twice — once in high school, and once last year when John Green encouraged Nerdfighters to join in reading it.  The first time, I liked it a little.  The second time, I liked it a lot.  And it never occurred to me to wonder about whether Gatsby was actually white, until I read this post on Tumblr, by someone whose url is pollums:

The Great Gatsby is a story of a man that makes his fortune bootlegging and throws countless magnificent parties all in hopes of attracting the attention of his old flame Daisy.

But it’s really a story about insurmountable class barriers. Daisy will never be with Gatsby, no matter how much she claims to love him. No matter how hard Gatsby tries, he will always be stuck on West Egg, only able to admire the ‘green light’ of upper class american romanticism from afar.

[...]

Not only was the insurmountable barrier between him and Daisy one of class and upbringing, but also one of race.

What we take for granted as Gatsby’s whiteness is actually a omission of detail rather than a specific indicator that he was white.

Obviously, this isn’t the case in the lastest Gatsby movie, that came out last week (which, by the way, I’m dying to see.)  But I’m definitely going to be looking for it in my next read-through of the book.

Note:  This post was originally titled “Was Gatsby black?”, then I found out that the article that the post I’m blogging about referenced also had that title.

Continue reading »]]> I follow a handful of mens’ fashion blogs on Tumblr, because I like fashion and dresses don’t have pockets.  Today, I follow reblogged another fashion blog, that saw fit to extend its purview beyond clothes, and into writing.

The post was called “Stylish Punctuation,” and it’s linked here but its main thesis was that people who punctuate poorly are dumb, undesirable, and essentially bad people.

This is a topic I feel strongly about, so I responded.  And, because I like the response, I’ve reproduced it here:

###

Bullshit.

I don’t object to your criticism of the exclamation point, but I do — strongly — object to your suggestion that poor punctuation implies “a poorly organized mind.”

There are certain principles in English writing that people who spend a lot of time thinking about it will tend to converge on, although even that is touchy.  minimizing the use of the exclamation point.

But when that tendency doesn’t emerge in a person’s writing, it does not mean that they are thick, or slow, or mentally disorganized.  All it means is that they don’t feel it’s necessary to bother mastering English writing to the highest possible degree — usually, because they know the people they’re writing to will take their messages in good faith and interpret them as though they were writ, reasonable person.

If you don’t need your writing to be comprehensible by a large, diverse audience of strangers, or by strangers who speak a wildly different version of English than you, or who may be reading your work hundreds of years after you’ve writ, and if your meaning is not so complicatedly precise that you need to have a perfect mastery over syntax to not screw it up, then it’s fine if you end your messages with forty!!!

When some, it’s not a freaking catastrophe, it doesn’t make them a bad person, and while it’s not intrinsically wrong to be annoyed by it (your emotions being more-or-less out of your control) judging people for it doesn’t make you discerning, it makes you a dick.

Continue reading »]]> I’m staying at a hotel next month, for Readercon, a science fiction and fantasy writers’ convention.  With this or other conventions, I generally stay in about one hotel a year, so when I see articles about the secret inner-workings of hotels, I’m always curious.

Some of these are a little squicky — I’m certainly never going to use #6, “Never, Ever Pay for the Minibar.”  But I’m probably not going to try #10 for a different reason.

There is always a better room, and when I feel that 20 you slipped me burning in my pocket, I will find it for you. And if there is nothing to be done room-wise, I have a slew of other options: late checkout, free movies, free minibar, room service amenities, and more. I will do whatever it takes to deserve the tip and then a little bit more in the hope that you’ll hit me again.

Some people feel nervous about this move. Please don’t. We are authorized to upgrade for special occasions. The special occasion occurring now is that I have a solid 20. That’s special enough for me!

I have read in several places that bribing service employees generally works.  And I’ve always wanted to try it, but I doubt I’m ever going to.  Not because I think it’s morally wrong, but because I have a severe sense of anxiety that I would get turned down — maybe I’d come off like I was a manager in disguise, or something — and just be incredibly embarrassed.

So, since I’m going to Readercon with my friend, and I’m always at least a little bit afraid that all my friends secretly hate me, I will definitely not be trying anything that requires being remotely smooth.

Maybe I’ll try it some time if I have to go to a hotel room alone.  May as well get the better room then, right?

Continue reading »]]> My new(ish) blog has a new banner!

I really liked the old banner, the one with the ice:

An artifact from the old times

but it does not fit with the themes I’m going for now.  Kept the text, though.  I like that text.

Also, interestingly,  I found in my files a much nicer version of the old banner — it was clearer, less gray, all that.  I’m not sure why I didn’t use it.  I mean, this one’s foggier, and the text looks more behind-the-ice, which is certainly nicer looking.  But the other one was less depressing.

Dear former readers, if any of you are in attendance: While I’m fixing things up and putting them back together, is there anything on the blog you miss, or would want back?  Let me know in the comments.

Continue reading »]]> Want a good, fast short story about dragons that doesn’t involve any burning villages?  Smaug, MD by Andrew Kaye is one of the coolest short stories I’ve read recently, and it’s up at Daily Science Fiction for free.

Doctor Longtooth tapped at the x-ray images with a single gold-sheathed talon. A troubled series of clicks rattled at the back of his throat. Smoke dribbled from the corners of his mouth. “I am sorry, Mr. Callahan,” his voice rumbled. “It is at stage four. And the tissue is dying.”

My father stared at the images. What should have been the black shadows of his lungs were instead a foggy white reminiscent of frosted glass. “That’s it then,” he said, taking my hand and squeezing. “It’s over. It was a good life while it lasted.”

(Keep reading…)

Continue reading »]]> A couple days ago, my Google Alerts informed me that Rupert Grint’s pilot for a comedy about a teenage superhero, which would also have featured Stephen Fry, was not picked up by CBS.  I am disappointed, CBS.  You should know better.  (I have no idea why.  Maybe the show sucked.  But still, from an entirely uninformed perspective, I think they got it wrong.)

Continue reading »]]> So, I just re-installed the theme I had before my blog broke.  That’s scary, because I don’t know if it’s the theme that broke my last blog.  I mean, it could have been anything — any of the sub-blogs installed under nested URLs within my blog, any of the plugins I downloaded, there’s a good chance it was just trying to install a Wiki.

But now that I have this theme, which I found by digging through the archive, I could theoretically start piecing together all the stuff that was there before, on my blog, putting it back just the way it was.  But, like I said, I don’t want to do that.

So I’m going to make some temporary executive design decisions tonight, and within the next couple days I’m going to ask around for some feedback to figure out a more permanent image strategy.

Please help.