Category Archives: Social Networking

What Exactly is a Nice Guy?

Memoirs, Relationships, Social Networking, Writing, , , , , ,
In my many space travels as a legospaceman, I never ran into a civilization that didn’t speak lego

One of the more common tropes of banter on social media is the concept of nice guys and how someone feels she was treated badly by one, and thus, they’re all just really bad guys. It’s almost its own demographic within the confines of writing that whenever I see a story that mentions “nice guys”, I suspect it’s going to turn negative and start talking about how nice guys are anything but that.

Well, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. Most nice guys aren’t nice guys. They’re opportunists that hide behind the designation and then will eventually pounce when the time finally comes around. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t guys out there who aren’t nice guys; it just means that there are very few, and most women will come across one or two in her lifetime, and probably never even realize he was standing in front of her at the time because she’s focused more on the guy pretending to be one and making lots of noise to convince her of that possibility.

I remember a story of a friend of mine who stopped by our usual coffee joint one day and started out the conversation with “I don’t understand women. I’m a nice guy, and I get treated like crap.”

Now, you’re probably thinking all sorts of things about my “friend”, who let’s just call Bob for the sake of names, and let’s just get the baggage out of the way with what we suspect about Bob. If Bob called himself a nice guy, your impression of him probably has a lot to do with how you’ve been treated by the guys in your past, so that if you’ve been treated badly, you’re probably going to think Bob is just pretending to be a nice guy, and if you’ve had a decent relationship with guys in your past, you might suspect that he could be a nice guy, but he probably has a flaw or two that might need to be fixed.

But Bob was really none of those. You see, Bob was full of crap.

When Bob told me this nice guy stuff, I remembered that he had been in a dicey relationship with Shirley because she had found out about Becky, and he was trying to make time with Veronica (yeah, all made up names cause this isn’t a gossip column). But seriously, he wasn’t loyal, cared only about the woman he was with at the very moment he happened to be standing in front of her, and he either dumped or got dumped by them on almost a whim.

He was most definitely not a nice guy.

But here’s the catch. He THOUGHT he was a nice guy.

Why? Because he was who he was, and in most people’s stories they are never the villain; they are always the hero. Our psyche is designed to make us feel that way. Our inner voice rarely says, “hey, dufus, you’re a bad guy.” But there are many occasions where it probably should.

As a guy who tends to be that person that people confide in, let me just tell you that practically every guy sees himself as a nice guy. Because he’s who he is, and I would argue that even a guy sitting on death row for murdering half the population of Arkansas with a chainsaw is probably looking into the mirror and saying: “Nails, you’re really a nice guy.” That’s just the natural state of people. We’re stupid when we need to be stupid just so we can get through the day into the next one.

So, what is a nice guy? Or more importantly, do any actually exist?

I’d like to think they do, and I’d like to say that I’m probably one of them, but I may suffer from disillusion just like Bob did. I’m bred like every other male on the planet in that I’m always going to believe my inner voice is helping me to do the best job I can, so therefore, I must be a nice guy. Wouldn’t surprise me, however, if there’s some woman out there thinking to herself, “sorry, kiddo, but you couldn’t even put the toilet seat down no matter how many times I told you,” so even that’s probably just in perspective. Some people are going to like you, and others, no matter what you do or say, aren’t going to like you.

That’s just life.

So, let’s take it a step further. If you desired to be a nice guy, what would differentiate you from those who aren’t, because in the end, just gaining the designation of “nice” indicates that there must be those who aren’t nice, or are at least not as nice. So, how do we achieve just that?

I’d argue that to begin with, your goals need to be further than a cost-benefit analysis of outcomes. If you do everything in the guise of transactional behavior (if I do this, I get that), you’re never going to achieve a sense of niceness. Instead, you’re going to gain whatever item or items you were striving for that you hoped your good nature would yield for you. There’s no niceness in that whatsoever.

When I think about feeling “nice,” I often find myself having to think outside of myself. And it’s a two-step process. First, you have to want to do something for others to benefit them. And then, which is the hardest part, you have to do it in a way that doesn’t actually work to benefit you.

Years back, I used to mentor young people in writing. People used to ask me what I got out of it. My response was that one day I would get to see really good writing out there in the world that I wouldn’t have seen if I hadn’t offered my assistance back then. I saw that as “nice” behavior, even though in the end, I was still probably getting something out of the mix. But then I ran across predatory writing mentors that were interested in achieving a piece of someone’s future success, or some that actually used it as a vehicle to further their dating prospects, neither of which seemed very “nice” to me. But then, I suspect “nice” wasn’t exactly a part of their process.

So, after years of interacting with people on various levels, I’ve come to the conclusion that being a nice guy means going out of your way to help others without any desire for compensation or benefit in return. Having said that, there’s an element that sometimes goes over the top with this definition, where people think to be “nice” you have to actually sacrifice and lose something to achieve such a status. Again, that’s back to the transactional approach to giving and receiving.

For me, I’m satisfied just going out of my way to see someone else benefit from something I’ve done or said. And sometimes, just a smile of acknowledgement is enough to make me feel that I’ve done something that is perceived as being “nice”. Those who seek awards or accolades aren’t necessarily nice people, but people seeking some type of validation as payment.

Back when I was in grad school, I remember the grad lounge had a printer that always broke down. Before going back to grad school, I was a computer repair technician, and I specialized in harder to maintain aspects of that field like monitors, hard drives and, yes, printers. So, often, when I heard another grad student complaining about how he or she couldn’t get his or her papers completed in time because of the printer, I would sneak into the lab at night and actually fix the printer so it would be working the next morning. No one ever figured out who was constantly fixing the printer (it was old and it happened a lot due to the amount of usage), but eventually people started giving credit to one of the “smarter” grad students who was always bragging about his accomplishments; he even took credit for it. I could have jumped in and revealed his lack of accomplishments, but honestly, I didn’t care, and I found it kind of funny while a bit interesting as it told me more and more about this individual than I would have ever discovered any other way. For the longest time, he was perceived as “nice” for going out of his way to fix the computer constantly, and he did nothing to challenge that assumption.

That sort of showed me that this is how so many people can constantly perceive the wrong people as “nice guys”, and then feel so angry when they discover they’re not, in fact, really nice guys.

The reality of the situation is that most nice guys will go under the radar because that’s part of the process of actually being a nice guy. When you seek validation for it, you’re not really nice any longer.

It’s kind of like the old Socratic argument that plagued the philosopher in his final days. People claimed he was the smartest man alive, yet he suspected that once he acknowledged himself as the smartest man, he would no longer be worthy of that title.

Nice guys are somewhat the same way, which is why the noisiest “nice guy” who wants everyone to know how nice he is, is often not actually a nice guy. If you want to find the “nice guy” look in the shadows near the guy taking the most credit, and chances are you may actually find him. Just don’t let him know you found him, because most often he remains the nice guy as long as he never has to claim the title.

OnlyFans to Block Adult Content

Business, Relationships, Social Networking, Technology, , , , ,

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the adult content site OnlyFans has made a decision to ban future content that is adult in nature. Taken on the surface, this seems like a logical step for a company that is trying to appear more mainstream, but after unpacking this story, it appears there’s a lot going on under the surface, and the results may vary and the owls may not be what they seem.

For those who deal with these types of subjects on the surface only, it seems very straight-forward, but if you listen to the responses from those in the industry, the rhetoric ranges from “the sky is falling” to “this doesn’t change anything from the status quo.” However, there are changes coming, and yes, they are going to affect some people more than others. So, exactly how?

Let’s just put it this way: If you’re already a sex worker content creator with a huge following, the change means very little. Most of the traffic for OnlyFans rarely came through the platform itself; people didn’t find content creators by searching the site (the site was never designed to cater to that process). Instead, sex workers who already had a strong following just advertised they were on OnlyFans and then the people who were already interested in their content went there for an easy process to access more of their material. For those types of creators, there are other services available that not only replace OnlyFans, but they were there long before OnlyFans emerged on the scene. So, those content creators will make do and continue to strive as before.

Where this change makes the largest impact is on the newest demographic: Young women who gravitated towards OnlyFans after the emergence of the pandemic. At first, the large swell of creators joining the platform were mostly adult workers who had very little (or no) Internet presence. As their physical, in person business model was drying up due to the fact that men were not as easy to translate into customers while people were dying from Covid-19, much of their “activity” they would normally charge for could now be converted to virtual interactivity that they could then share for monetary rewards. And what they quickly discovered was that because OnlyFans made it possible to build a lucrative following (as the customers weren’t just someone they met on the street who might never return), they now had repeat customers who could access their content at all times without them having to actually physically maintain proximity to their clients in order to provide services and then get paid.

Because this was both lucrative and quick income, it should not surprise anyone that young women who were probably never planning to become sex workers themselves realized that there could be a lot of money to be made if they, too, hung out their shingle in this marketplace. And almost overnight, starting with strippers and cam girls and then leading to moms and repressed librarians, women were actively engaged in selling promiscuous content to horny guys (well, to anyone, but mostly guys).

The one negative that always seemed to be in the background was the stigma of doing sex work, which for naive reasons young woman seemed to believe might never happen. But as their content was on the Internet, and there is no class amongst the people who subscribe to this type of content, they started to become very surprised when their content became widespread, and future aspirations (and that wasn’t sex work) because almost impossible because of the stigma attached to this occupation. Women, with occupations ranging from doctors to school teachers, lost their jobs when their employers found out they were previously sex workers, even though the women would often try to make the argument that selling pictures of themselves naked was not sex work and then disappointed when such protests fell on deaf ears.

There was a very interesting episode involving Kevin Samuels who confronted a group of OnlyFans girls about how they needed to start banking their money soon because the cash cow of OnlyFans was not going to last forever, and those girls treated him like a moron because this Internet celebrity obviously didn’t understand the business world as well as they did. Well, this announcement from OnlyFans just yesterday indicates that he knew exactly what was going to happen, and one can only imagine how panicked these girls must be right now due to such an announcement.

What makes this somewhat tragic is that such an announcement was inevitable. It happened with Paypal, it happened with Tumblr, and it has happened with so many types of business applications that started out by appealing to the sex worker industry just to get their foot in the door before abandoning that demographic and “going legit”. And as tends to happen with most of these companies, that act of going legit will end up being their downfall because they, too, are tainted by the stigma of being a platform for sex, which is why people will avoid it like the plague if they’re not actually attracting the element that made it famous in the first place. Imagine going to an exclusive club because it always had the hottest women and let those women in free (realizing that was going to bring in customers) and then decided “we’re big enough now that we don’t need to do that” and stopped letting attractive women in for free. So they stopped coming. So would their clientele because the reason they go to those clubs is because of the overabundance of attractive women in the first place. And then the business closes.

This is why nightclubs NEVER do that.

So, it will be interesting to see if OnlyFans goes the direction of Myspace as another company takes its place, or if it somehow morphs itself into something sustainable by hosting celebrities and cooking shows. As for the many women who made their future successes contingent on the platform, hopefully they prepared for this future, already were a sex worker to begin with and can compensate by finding incoming from other revenue streams, or bite the bullet and try to re-enter the workplace environment, hoping beyond all prayers that no one ever finds out about their steamy past. In this digital age, the integration of digital technology has become crucial for success in various industries.

All I know is that I won’t be their lifeline. I’m a lot smarter these days than when I was young and stupid.

Dents in the Man-O-Sphere

News, Podcast, Relationships, Social Networking, Uncategorized, , , , , ,

There’s an interesting dynamic going on in the manosphere, which, if you’re not following this kind of content, you’d be very likely to have no idea it’s actually happening. But as I’ve mentioned in previous posts (and a few Youtube podcasts), I’ve been fascinated by this area of information, for both great content and some of the worst media I’ve come across in quite some time.

For those not familiar, the mansophere ranges from men going their own way (MGTOW) to dating strategies to a woman-hating rhetoric that resembles Calvin in Calvin & Hobbes with his “No Girls Allowed” Club. One of the more popular segments of this genre has been the whole “high-quality man” concept, where men purport to be the most valued type of men because they meet extremely unspecific checkmarks on female dating desires (i.e., six figure income, six feet tall, washboard abs, etc.). So, it’s not surprising that there are several podcasts out there where men claim to be exactly what these “high-quality men” are claimed to be. One of them happens to be a podcast called Fresh & Fit (which, if interested, you can find by searching for them on Youtube).

So, as I was researching a lot of this information (as I do with a lot of really strange topics), I started following this Fresh & Fit feed, and to make a long story short, it’s basically two African-American males in their young adulthood ages who sit around a table and ask questions of guests who came on their show. In most podcasts, they will have a large group of young women who all appear to have visited right before heading out to the Miami club scene, and then the two guys will continue to ask them questions about what they seek in men. And as you would expect, as their guests are almost always young (in their early twenties), generally attractive and quite often street stupid, they’ll go through their laundry lists of what a man has to be in order to attract their attention. After a while, you start to just hear their responses as noise because quite often a 19 year old girl who has done absolutely nothing in her life, other than have a somewhat lucrative Only Fans page where she sells her body for quick profit will indicate that a man needs to make at least $300,000 a year to even get her to blink, which basically translates to “hey, here’s a future cat lady who hasn’t bought her first cat yet”, meaning almost all of them are so in dreamy land that doesn’t exist, so that it becomes more comedy than anything else. Some of the men would prefer to go through online sites and check out the Best Platforms for Private Affairs in the UK that can ease their doubt of their self-worth.

But the main point that you finally end up with the Fresh & Fit podcast is that the two guys pretend they are high-value men that women should be fighting themselves over to even have a chance with them. In reality, they come off as desperate beta males, cosplaying as cool dudes, but it’s their schtick, so let’s just leave it at that. However, their approach to their podcast is that they are giving advice to the men out there (dating advice) and helping men to become their better selves. And while sometimes they do just that, most of the time, the podcast serves as a vehicle to allow the main guy of the two (Myron) to insult the women on the show, and women in general while acting like he has all of the answers because he has a podcast. The amount of times they try to raise their clout by talking about how many subscribers they have becomes very tiring and gets very old, almost like telling a potential girlfriend that she should date you because lots of women like you.

Anyway, one of the other podcasts I also watch is called Aba & Preach, and it involves two guys who basically address social topics and give their spin (or approach to them). What makes them unique is that they are very down to earth, really know their stuff, and basically call things as it is without ever turning childish in their approach. After a few years of watching their podcast, I’ve come to the conclusion that you can generally trust what they have to say because their worldly view rarely steers me wrong.

So, fast-forward, or reverse backwards, depending on your observation, Aba & Preach called out Fresh & Fit for some very specific content, pointing out that there were records of Myron actually telling women they had to give up sex if they wanted to be on the show and a bunch of other behaviors that went against the whole narrative of them being alpha males, and especially high-value men. The next day (or it might have been that night), Fresh & Fit did an episode where they acted like children and started making ad hominem attacks on Aba & Preach, and even went out of their way to start talking smack about Preach’s wife, who had nothing to do with the podcast whatsoever. This, in turn, led to a much more introspective criticism by Aba & Preach, which was both powerful and went over extremely well in the Youtube community. At the end of it, due to threats that were made from Fresh & Fit, Preach accepted a dare from the two Youtubers to box, and began to physically prepare to travel to Miami to do exactly that.

I should point out here that if you’ve ever seen Preach, you would not want that guy coming to your city to do any type of harm to you. He’s a big guy, and he has a certain disposition that indicates that he would back up everything he says with an equal amount of force. Myron and FreshPrinceCEO (his partner) seem to put off an air of being all talk, in comparison.

What happened next is kind of the point of this write-up. Fresh & Fit did a podcast the next day where they made a political apology, which if you’re not aware of what that means, they apologized to their subscribers for taking the wrong approach to this altercation. Aba & Preach responded with no intention of accepting the apology, stating, “the apology needs to be as loud as the insults” or something close to that. And they were right because at no time did their “apology” actually appeal to Preach, whose wife had been insulted, amongst other insults centered on Preach’s character, and even on his nationality and heritage. So, Preach has further indicated that he is moving forward with concluding the altercation as Fresh & Fit offered, in person and physically.

Today, FreshPrinceCEO made a podcast where he was buying a gun, kind of an out of the blue podcast that had no connection to any type of content either he or his partner has ever made. As expected, Aba made a statement on Youtube calling out FreshPrinceCEO on horrible optics and timing for such a podcast.

What’s really fascinating about this whole thing has been the response of the viewer base. For the most part, Aba & Preach have been hailed for direct, levelheaded responses and the commentaries have been nothing but positive. The commentaries on Fresh & Fit’s response has been horrible. Just yesterday, they lost 11k subscribers, which if you ask me, was the reason the “apology” was even attempted in the first place. They seem to be hemorrhaging members from their subscribers and while their most diehard followers support them, even on their own podcasts they are receiving all sorts of back and forth, rather than blanket support.

I find this whole thing to be really interesting because for the most part, what happens on the Internet rarely has ramifications, almost as if the realm suffers from the old adage of “any publicity is good publicity” or the opposite which is more of a cancel culture when you’ve upset the status quo and lose everything. The Fresh & Fit podcast seemed to be benefiting from the first axiom without realizing that ramifications can suck, and once they start to emerge, it’s like a slippery slope that doesn’t end until you’re at the very bottom of the hill with no way to get back up again.

So, over the next few weeks it should be interesting to see if they can survive this backlash, because I suspect that they are a lot like Hong Kong declaring war on China without realizing that might not bring the outcomes you want in the end.

The Logic of Dealing with Unmoving Objects

Education, Podcast, Politics, Relationships, Social Networking, Uncategorized, Writing, , , , , ,

A number of years ago, I ran into a conflict that I never encountered before but ever since then have never forgotten. You see, I was an editor for the opinion section of a small newspaper some years back, and I had printed the article of a young man who criticized a group of people who were local moped riders that happened to be part of a moped community. The immediate response from that community was not dialogue explaining why he was wrong, but instead an extremely hostile approach that included attempts to attack the very nature of the newspaper itself, including physical threats and intentions of causing actual physical harm. This type of behavior went on for several days over the next week, and it was an immediate education in how irrational and quick to arms certain members of the population can be, especially when the moped community we were talking about was generally a very pleasant and friendly sort whenever dealing with pretty much any other issue beforehand. Basically, what it taught me is that people can be easily led to very dark places in very short times, and people are generally on the verge of being very irrational and unfeeling towards any other person to whom they are not personally accountable.

Fast-forward a couple of decades to today, and I’d like to share with you an experience I encountered only a short time ago. Over the pandemic, I started to view a lot more Youtube programming than I had in the past, and at one point, I was trying to find videos on how to get better sleep, and I came across the ASMR community. Interesting community. But they’re not actually the ones I want to talk about. But what I discovered is that when you watch a certain type of content on Youtube, you start to receive all sorts of recommendations for other content that is somewhat similar, and through one strange connection to the next, the algorithms ended up recommending to me content that mostly caters to what I’ll refer to as the “man-o-sphere”, a place where videos seem to incorporate a lot of male commentators who seem to have a lot to say about the state of dating in America. And what I discovered was that it was content that was filled with some very angry voices.

The thing about this content is that Youtube has a really weird algorithm-recommendation process that seems to suggest more and more outrageous content, thinking that’s the natural progression of what you wish to pursue. So, what started off as videos to help me sleep, narrated by very kind, friendly women with soft voices, turned into angry, violent “my way is the only way” right-wing women haters. The sad thing is that the transition in recommended content did not really take that long to occur.

Anyway, I could talk about this content for hours, but that’s not really what I came to talk about either. What I wanted to talk about was something I discovered called MGTOW, which happens to stand for “men going their own way”, which is basically an approach that men make who have given up on ever pursuing traditional relations with women because of a belief of something called “market forces” in dating circles that seem to value this elusive end goal of high value men avoiding any involvement with women who can never seem to measure up to a system of goalposts that become harder and harder for anyone to ever achieve. And a lot of the evidence cited will generally be some very specific types of data that point out that over the years feminism has changed both men and women in ways that make the man and woman dynamic from history more adversarial than it’s ever been and now more of a man vs. woman dynamic that constantly feeds into a zero sum dichotomy where men always lose out unless they happen to be part of this mysterious one percent of the highest value men.

Now, a lot of this rhetoric can be pretty persuasive, even if a lot of it is often cloaked in the retelling of a lot of wives’ tales involving statistics that are quite often repeated over and over to sound authentic, but when I started investigating a lot of the studies myself, I realized how flawed so many of them were, meaning that even some of the commonly held understandings in the community itself were based on misinformation. And let’s just say that as an outsider to this community, I kind of came in with a doe-eyed approach and thought one day that I’d share my observations with the rest of the world, because while some of it was flawed, some of it was interesting enough that I thought my public contacts might be interested in some of this information as well, and then, well, just decide for themselves.

So, I created a Youtube report of my own that was a little over an hour long, and I posted it, expecting my usual cobweb-like response. Instead, I got that response I remember from the moped community some years back.

When I did my report, I was reacting to the MGTOW community that I had observed, and I wanted to put it out there for others to know this community was out there. I wasn’t really all that critical of the community, but just presented what I saw. But then made a couple of blatant errors. The first was not realizing that some of the sources I was referencing in the story weren’t really considered a part of the MGTOW community, but kind of a secondary community that I had not even known was a thing. You see, there were levels of what I will now call the man-o-sphere, which is broken up amongst different philosophies, one of which is the dating strategy community, another being the pick-up community, one being a strictly anti-feminist community, and then kind of in their own corner of this hemisphere, the MGTOW people. Well, because I had titled this story something like “Finding out about MGTOW” and then going into my observations and analysis, an immediate campaign of dislikes started from people who were adamant supporters of a very specific MGTOW philosophy AND community. In my years of doing Youtube, I don’t think I’ve ever received a dislike for a video, mainly because most of my videos are designed to inform or help people. And within minutes of posting it, I had a few dozen dislikes from people and some really heated responses in the comments that were basically just very angry that something they watched didn’t seem to treat MGTOW like it was the greatest thing since sliced butter. And strangely enough, there was basically nothing negative that was even shared about MGTOW and its philosophy. It was like some weird signal switch had been hit and now everything that followed would forever bathe the room in darkness.

After the continued negative attention, and a tiny sliver of positives and likes indicating people found the report fascinating, I just took the video down and decided to never do a video on that population ever again. I quickly came to the conclusion that they weren’t interested in discussion, or even educating anyone about anything. For a population that doesn’t appreciate when women call them out for toxic masculinity, the response was pretty damn toxic and completely out of the blue. If I learned anything, it was that some people don’t play well with others and have no desire to come to any common ground to raise a common conversation. It also sort of illustrated exactly what seems to be wrong with our country right now and why it’s not going to get any better. As long as people remain in silos away from each other, our country is forever going to continue to spread apart at the seams.

I know this sounds a bit depressing, especially as I haven’t written anything in some time on this blog, but I really wanted to share this, and I’d greatly appreciate any insight you might have to share in response.

Dating Someone Who Is Bat S**t Crazy

Relationships, Social Networking, , ,
It always starts off great!

Years back, I had been between relationships and just decided that perhaps I needed time to myself, basically dating no one. I was in the middle of undergraduate work for genetics at the time, planning to eventually move onto medical school when a long-term relationship just fell apart on me. Realizing I had a number of years of tough education ahead of me, I realized this was probably not the time to get involved in any kind of future relationship.

Life doesn’t really work that way, unfortunately.

During that summer, I took a part time temp job to just pass the time (and keep up my finances before school work made that impossible), so I got this really mundane job working for a subsidiary of Pacific Bell. They were moving one section of the business to another location, so the job consisted of a bunch of temp workers literally transferring physical files from one place to another. Very boring work.

But kind of exactly what I needed after a break-up.

There were a few dozen other workers there with me, and there were a couple of supervisors. I kept being offered one of the mid-level supervisory positions, due to education, but as I wasn’t really there for longevity or intentions of rising up, I chose to remain at the bottom and just do the grunt work. Again, it was exactly what I needed.

The job was supposed to last about three months, and about a few weeks into it, the cliques already started to form, and as you would suspect, it’s very easy to get cast into certain corners, even without doing anything to make it happen.

One of the first things I noticed was that because of the horrible management of this project, we had lots and lots of time of sitting around in conference rooms just talking. I quickly started bringing books to read to pass the time, but all around me, people did the sort of things you might expect happen when people have lots of time and nothing to do. Add in those cliques I talked about, and you might get the impression that things might turn sour really quick-like.

The place had a real feral activity to it that resonated with herd mentality. The group would often find a weaker member of the room and then pounce on him or her, pretty much turning that person’s life into a nightmare until the person finally decided to never return again. We lost a number of people that way.

In the early days of this group activity, I found myself targeted early but that ended quickly as I was also a debater (and had been doing it in college to begin with); they discovered it was no fun engaging someone who could rapidly respond to anything they wanted to bring my way. So, I was mainly left to my own devices, which, as I said, usually consisted of me and my book.

For the most part, I really didn’t pay much attention to what happened around me, until I noticed the attention turn to a young woman named Sally. Now, Sally was originally from Hong Kong, on a path towards citizenship in the US, but she spoke horrible English. This made her an easy target of a group of workers who just loved the idea that it took her time to respond to everything they said, so it was easy to twist her words around and add to her frustration. Plus, she was the kind of young woman who got really upset, really fast and when edged on by people who are just trying to cause trouble, it does not bode well.

Due to a few assignments that were doled out by coincidence, Sally and I spent a few hours alone in the room when others were doing other things, so I actually had a chance to talk to her. Unlike the rest of them, I’m a really good listener, so when she was struggling to say what she wanted to say, due to broken English, I spent more time just listening and letting her find the words that she wanted to say instead. I learned quite a bit about her and found some of her background to be quite fascinating. Example: She was very well educated; just not in English.

As you might suspect, the others treated her like she was stupid, as people tend to do when someone around them is not fluent in the mainstream language. And as they continued on their warpath each time they tried to spook her, I started interjecting in those conversations so that not only did they have to attack her, but now they had to go after me as well. And as I said before, I’m not the sort of person you want to engage in argumentation.

Quickly, she realized it was a lot safer to hang out wherever I was and was pretty much always sitting next to me. The others just quickly realized that she wasn’t worth the effort, as they weren’t getting the results they wanted, so they went after someone else and continued their usual bantering. To be honest, I don’t remember much more about them after that.

So, needless to say, it was very difficult for me to separate myself from Sally during this work assignment. At the same time, I didn’t want to lead her on or get involved with any relationships at this time, so even though she was always around me, I tried to avoid thinking much about it. However, as it was getting close for me to finish my time there (school was going to be starting back up soon), I was going to take the coward way out and just disappear once my assignment was complete.

Unfortunately, Sally was a lot smarter than I realized. The day before I was supposed to be done (I had told no one but my immediate supervisor I was leaving), she appeared where I was sorting files and held out her hand: “Phone number!” she said.

I guess I should have realized there was a problem when we first started dating because it started with me getting home that night, receiving a message on my answering machine stating when and where we were meeting for coffee at a time she designated.

So, a couple of little things that help explain her a little further: First, she was a dead ringer for the actress Michelle Yeoh, something I made the mistake of saying one early date. She got extremely angry and said “She’s ugly!” Which, of course, she she’s not.

She also hated every one of my friends. Every one. The men were all abusers. Her words. The women? I suspect a bit of jealousy, even though they were never a threat to her in any way.

On a whim, she would just get really angry over anything. When we disagreed on something, she would pinch, really hard. And she would rarely stop. I know it sounds kind of funny because pinches don’t sound really painful, but oh wow, they were. I’ve been shot before, and I’m really not sure which one I’d consider worse.

One of my favorite, yet weird, experiences involves when we went to see a movie. The usher was taking our tickets and he looked up and her and nearly dropped his jaw, stating: “Oh, my god, you look just like the woman in the James Bond film.”

He was referring to, of course, Michelle Yeoh in Tomorrow Never Dies. The second he said it, I saw her face turn seriously angry, and I said: “I’ll go grab us some seats.” The last look I saw on his face was what appeared to be mortal fear as Sally was closing in on her next victim. About five minutes later, she sat down next to me, and I said, “He’s still alive, right?” She just nodded and then started in on some popcorn.

I’ll be honest, but I just wasn’t really ready for a relationship at the time. I kind of fell into it, and I really wasn’t over the previous one. And she kept getting more and more angry and violent as time moved on. I brought her to a school function once as my plus one, and my thesis advisor pulled me aside before asking me if she needed to plan an intervention to get me out of this relationship.

So, at some point I realized it was probably safer to end this relationship, so I tried to sit down with her and talk about it, but every time I did, she suddenly forgot how to speak any English, said she had to leave, and then came back a few days later as if nothing had happened. This stretched on for some time.

Finally, I set up a time where we could talk, and I said, without doubt, that this is something that needs to happen. Instead of pulling the same tactic, she nodded and left.

A few days later, she wrote me an email, and started with an abusive flurry of messages about how I was the worst person who ever walked the planet. I, at first, tried to respond in as friendly a manner as possible, but then those messages kept getting worse and worse. So, I stopped responding.

And then she started sending me bills. For her time. She had literally gone through and calculated everything she might have ever spent during our six months together and wanted compensation. So, clothes she bought, transportation she had taken, air she breathed, etc., was fair game. And when I didn’t respond, those amounts kept going up, like the worst loan shark in history.

Finally, I moved away and entered grad school. I stopped hearing from her.

Years later, a friend of mine from where I had been living sent me a link to a Craigslist ad. It was a series of pictures of Sally, with three kids (too young to have any connection to me), trying to find a new boyfriend because the last guy left her with three kids.

I don’t really have much to say. Maybe it’s just better that way.

Youtube and Controversies: Political attitudes, conservatism and the struggle with being non-political

Business, Computer Games, Podcast, Politics, Social Networking, Technology, Television, , , , , , , , , , , ,

For those who don’t actually already know this, my Ph.D work is in political science, and since then I’ve taught political science for years before adding another graduate degree and focusing on communication. However, one thing that always seemed to grate at me was that no matter how hard I tried to be non-political, it was practically impossible. Not for me. But for anyone who happened to be in the audience. Let me explain.

To explain, it’s important to probably point out my political affiliation, because that helps to explain why it’s even stranger. Back when I was first going through undergraduate work at West Point, I was a staunch conservative. There was no problem that I felt couldn’t be solved with our military, states’ rights and did I mention our military? When I got to grad school and started learning massive amounts of information about politics, I started to realize that I hated politics. A lot.

So, I sort of became an anarchist. And that has all sorts of problems if you’re capable of actually understanding what an anarchist is. You see, people think an anarchist is some crazy liberal that throws Molotov cocktails at cops. Well, that was one type of anarchist, specifically the Russians at the turn of last century and maybe the French, well, anytime in history. As an anarchist of my type, what it meant was that I hated the fact that we need a government to do anything because what almost always happens is we become part of corruption and oligarchy, to the point where government is almost always used as a tool to oppress other people. There are good people in government, but over time, those people get drowned out by people who see government as that tool to push through their personal agendas, and there’s no end to the types of agendas they might want to push (social programs, religion, anti-Internet policies, anti-gaming policies, anti-Shania Twain fundamentalism, etc.). What it doesn’t mean is that I want to throw Molotov cocktails at anyone. That requires upper arm strength and exercise, both things I do like to protest against.

Anyway, getting back to my original point, when I was teaching political science, one thing that inevitably happened in class is that some young student would want to know what my political affiliation was. And it was rarely out of actual interest. It was almost always to figure out whether or not to listen to anything I had to say as useful. If I picked an affiliation that was different than his or hers, they discounted everything I had to say. If it was the same, they often felt they knew as much as me and then didn’t have to listen any further. If I chose my usual tact and said that I don’t have an affiliation, or that I don’t discuss it, they automatically decided that it had to be the opposite of the one they had, or they assumed it had to be liberal (no, not sure why that assumption was always made).

That brings me to an interesting phenomenon I’ve come across recently. Over the Christmas break, I found myself overly interested in following a number of channels on Youtube that I found interesting. Mostly, it was ASMR artists, but when that got kind of boring (or I didn’t need to sleep), I started to branch out and find other types of subjects. My first “go to” was gaming channels, but I’ll be honest, the majority of those are awful, often hosted by some teenage mentality that tends to scream into the microphone, or thinks it’s 1980 and has lots of flashy stuff trying to send watchers into seizures. But a few of them were actually pretty good, and one of them is actually a bit of the subject of this post.

I don’t remember how I found it, but I came across a cast called The Quartering, hosted by Jeremy Hambly, a Youtube game industry reviewer who leans to the conservative side of the house. Having watched his podcasts over the last year, I would recommend his site if you’re interested in interesting perspectives on the industry, but at the same time understanding that sometimes he seems to get a little high on himself and takes on fights that are generally left to different avenues of the Internet. An example is how he has a tendency to want to create a space that lacks politics when it comes to computer gaming (something I highly support) but then falls right into the same territory himself when he goes anti SJW (social justice warrior) and becomes political in trying to advocate for not wanting to become political. Yeah, it’s kind of the same thing I ran into when teaching political science, and even though I was completely aware of the problem, the problem always exists. What I did discover to be the ONLY solution is one he hasn’t reached yet, and that’s to stop caring about politics, rather than focusing on politics as an approach to not being political. Yeah, I know that sounds bizarre and strange, but it’s basically the only way to deal with it.

This last week saw some interesting developments for Hambly as he lost one of his main sponsorship deals with a coffee company when it was alerted to one of his recent videos (that pissed off people who tend to get riled by SJW politics), so he decided he was no longer going to accept sponsorship deals. Unfortunately, this type of drama continues, no matter what someone does about it.

What I would like to say is that when he’s not dealing with actual politics, his information is actually pretty interesting. However, one thing I have noticed is that because he has such large numbers of subscribers (I believe it is upwards of 100,000 subscribers, but could be off on that, although I know it’s pretty damn high), Hambly does often ignore the fact that his influence quite often becomes a McLuhan message is the medium factor (he’ll go on an anti-Electronic Arts rant and then laugh when EA suffers financially, arguing that it was EA that caused its downfall, not the fact that perhaps Hambly’s negativity might have attributed to the down turn).

Moving away from Hambly here (as I said, I actually like him and think his information is informative, so I don’t want to get into a criticism mode here), one thing I’ve started to notice is that there are a lot of Youtubers who attempt to adopt the Hambly model, but completely fail to do so, and only make things worse because they turn into shrills for anti-establishment thought without doing anything other than harping on how much enjoyment they get out of the drama. Having watched a lot of this behavior over the last year or so, I am starting to feel that a lot of these commentators are somewhat responsible for the down turn the industry is starting to feel. I mean, think about it: If the majority of the people covering the industry keep talking about how bad the industry is, it’s going to feed the perspective that the industry is nothing but bad.

I used to work for the industry (both Maxis and EA), so I had a unique perspective myself, but at the same time I also realized that there are a lot of diverse minds in that atmosphere and whenever I tried to get a “this is how they feel at this company”, I find myself often realizing that I was putting too much of a spin on the thought based off of anecdotal information I received from a very limited observation of what I was able to see myself.

If You Want to Make America Great Again, Have Media Outlets Stop Using Tweets As Actual Stories

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I don’t even think people realize the problem that exists today with media. It’s not that media is wrong, false or lying. It’s that it’s lazy. And yeah, I know a big reason behind it is the consolidation of media outlets to get rid of people and save money. So, the problem has emerged to the next logical step: Find media anywhere you can get it.

And tweets is where they’ve found it. Because, let’s face it: It’s easy, it’s free, and it requires absolutely no work to put together a story that consists of someone’s response on Twitter.

But let’s also face the fact that it’s not actually a story. It’s a reaction from someone to something. And most likely, it’s irrelevant to practically everything.

Let’s take the Tweeter-in-Chief that gets quoted on Twitter the most. Instead of paying attention to actual policies the president is enacting or proposing, we get knee-jerk reactions from him at 3am in the morning when he’s just watched Fox & Friends and wants to let the world know that we must stop illegal aliens from stealing the world’s toilet tissue. or whatever stupid idea the bottom of the barrel commentators on that show have proposed at whatever time they actually air.

But the media eats this stuff up and actually reports it as a legitimate news story.

When news is dull or boring, we suddenly start to see “news” whenever one of the Kardassians picks a fight on Twitter with Taylor Swift, or whatever other shenanigans occur during that news cycle. The “famous for being famous” celebrities plan these stories for maximum coverage, and our media, realizing they don’t have anywhere near the amount of coverage to fill a 24 hour news cycle, eats it right up, and suddenly a turf war between two aging rappers ends up being a leading story. So, instead of reporting on something legitimate, or important, like anything written by Nicholas Kristof, or Rebecca Solnit, we get nonstop nonsense about the Kardassian sisters or “news” about toddlers in beauty pageants.

This morning, I woke up to read a “news” story about a Tweet from the president saying how much he believes that….

Not a story. It’s a moment of thought about something that is not a story. A story would be something actually happened. Legislation got passed, someone died, someone was arrested, an accuser was heard and listened to, a country declared war against another, a country attacked another, etc. Someone’s thoughts on something, especially something that came as a reaction to hearing an actual news story IS NOT NEWS.

So please. Stop passing drivel off as news.

And people, stop listening to it. When you hear it, turn it off because you didn’t get news. And better, contact the news agency and complain. Otherwise, it’s ALL you’re ever going to see and hear.

Just saying. I’ll tweet it for you, if it might cause you to think of it as real news.

Kavanaugh, Boys Will Be Boys, and Why This Problem Will Never Go Away

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I was watching Vice News Tonight, and they were covering some of the Kavanaugh garbage that we’re seeing on a daily basis right now, and it just sickens me that we have a bunch of men in charge of our government who apparently don’t care one iota that they’re about to empower (with enormous power and responsibility) someone who may have tried to rape another woman. And even more allegations are starting to emerge. And they’re trying to railroad him into the position so fast that NO OTHER WOMAN can possibly come forward in time to stop it.
 
One thing that was interesting was that they brought on a woman who was literally halted from testifying during the Anita Hill hearings for Clarence Thomas who ALSO had a sexual harassment story about Clarence Thomas, but she was shunted away by the people who wanted him put into power until the hearings were over. They made sure that atrocity happened, and THOSE SAME PEOPLE ARE STILL IN POWER TODAY. They’re the same people trying to push through the current guy.
 
But you know what really got me? At the end of the whole segment, four or five other women were giving their own stories of when men attacked them sexually but they were also never believed when these things happened. And it got me to thinking: How many of these types of guys have I known my entire life? The cool guy in high school. The jock in college. That guy who got all the girls. And now the weird guy who no woman ever talked to but is now in an office establishment with all sorts of other women who are forced to be around him all day long. So many people, and so many stories, which could mean this happens all the time.
 
Because that’s what I’m getting from all of these stories. These incidents aren’t rare. They’re more the norm. And if you are brave enough to hold a conversation with a group of women and just let them start talking about it, what you’ll discover is that almost ALL of them have a similar story of when this happened to them. Not one or two out of a room of 50. But 49 or 50 of them all have a horrifying story of some guy that violated them in some way.
 
And this is what we should be facing.
 
But we won’t. We’ll shuffle it under the rug, pretend it only happens with really bad people who, oh I don’t know, must not go to church or something equally ridiculous. And it will continue happening because we choose to let it happen.
 
Like people shooting up schools with guns. Because we choose to let it happen.
 
We’re all responsible, but we will blame a boogeyman who doesn’t exist, or just might exist. But we’re all responsible. And we’re responsible because we don’t do anything about it but act shocked and surprised.
 
Right now. Instead of doing something about this, the people who CAN do something are saying: “This is just a political witch hunt. Get him in the office and the problem goes away.”
 
And that’s what’s probably going to happen.
 
Or, we’ll get brave this one time (honestly, I don’t believe that will happen), but we’ll do nothing about the larger problem because it’s too hard. It takes too much work. We can never solve this. Or whatever weak excuse we will give, including my favorite: “It’s not me, so I don’t see what trying to stop it will do because there’s no way to tell who is responsible.”
 
I already told you. WE are responsible.
 
And WE will do absolutely nothing.
 
Now, I’m going to go back to killing aliens in a video game because at least there the world makes a lot more sense.

The Depressing Part of Being a Writer

Books, Business, Memoirs, Social Networking, The Deck Const, Writing, , , , , ,

Joshua had a few things he needed to say

There are a lot of writers out there who haven’t been that successful. Yet, they keep on plugging away, convinced that one day it’s all going to work out for them. I’m kind of in that same boat, but unlike the others who never had their chance, my chance came several times…and sort of fizzled away. Let me explain:

Years back, I was shopping my first book. I was in my early twenties, and I had written it while in the Army. It was a really good book called INNOCENT UNTIL PROVEN GUILTY. And it was published. Not to great fanfare, but it was published.

So, I started shopping my second novel, LOSER (which would eventually become LEADER OF THE LOSERS). Nothing. Not even a whimper from anyone wanting to sell it. One editor pointed out that perhaps it was the depressing title. Publishers didn’t want to publish books with such a negative title. So, it sat there, forever.

Then I wrote my next novel, the infamous The Armageddon Project, which was a story that took place during the Cold War. Keep in mind, it was written during the Cold War. But at the time, the Cold War was ending, so I quickly rewrote it to match the new events taking place in the world (much of the action takes place in East Germany and Western Russia). And then those regions kept changing, so I kept rewriting it. At some point, the title changed to match the main character (known as “the Unicorn”), so the title became TO TOUCH THE UNICORN. And then a publisher told me that the title was too much like a fantasy novel, but the novel was corporate/government espionage. He also said that it was hard to figure out what exactly the main character’s job was. At the time, I had created the concept of an economic hit man, but the concept was completely unknown in the 1990s, so it just couldn’t catch on. Years later, after Germany and Russia have settled into the republics they are, the story changed massively and is now being rewritten for about the 90th time, and it now takes place in 1991 during the August coup in the former Soviet Union. It’s now called 72 HOURS IN AUGUST, but it’s on the back burner for a rewrite.

Anyway, somewhere around this time, I was starting to make a name for myself as a writer. I had been writing tons of short stories and they were published in a bunch of different magazines. At first, they were published in mostly literary magazines, but then the larger presses started picking them up, and several prominent magazine editors started recognizing my name from previous things I had written. Things were kind of going pretty nice for me back then.

And then one of my novels was bought for publishing by a prestigious book publisher. And then I got an agent who once represented one of the greatest science fiction writers in modern times before he passed away. All was looking great.

And then the publishing company folded. Overnight. Without a single warning.

My agent got into an accident and severely injured her head. She dropped out of the business for a while to recover, and when she did, she seriously didn’t even remember who I was. I gave up trying to re-establish our working relationship.

And then the Internet exploded. Amazon became the biggest thing in independent writing, and the industry changed overnight. If you weren’t already established, you were basically an unknown, and if you were an unknown, you had to now start building a social following in order to even sell a single book. Not being really good at social networking (just has never been my thing), my career kind of just fizzled and died. Sure, I sell a few books here and there, but I might sell more just standing on the corner and asking people to give me a buck for a hand written copy.

Fast-forward to today, and I’m the middle of writing an epic novel series that I suspect might not be read by more people than this blog post. I say this with trepidation because of the amount of time invested in this project. I’ve already spent seven years researching this thing, and I’m about to start putting actual physical work into writing it. Keep in mind that my last two projects took me each half a decade to produce, and my stuffed animals get more attention when they’re pulled over for drunk driving. My previous project took me six years to complete the first book (of a three book project). The research involved was extensive. It was called The Deck Const. Doesn’t matter what it was about because no one’s going to read it any way.

The project before that is probably the one piece of work of which I am most proud. When people talk about a crown achievement in one’s life, that book would probably be mine. It is a humorous novel that tells the story of the last hero of Troy who comes home to found a little civilization called America. It’s called THE AMERIAD, and it was so much work, and it involved so much research. But to someone reading it, one gets the sense that it’s a simple, fun story that seems very familiar. It’s told in Iliad/Odyssey format, and the main character is actually the translator who has interpreted this found epic in the only way the worst translator could possibly ever do. The book was so hard to write, especially in a way that made it feels so natural.

That’s the dilemma I find myself in as I finish up the last stages of research to begin constructing my Arthurian epic. And part of me wonders if my time might better be spent playing a video game instead.

The Problems of a Young People’s Movement

Business, Education, News, Politics, Social Networking, , , , , , ,

Recently, there’s been a lot of attention being paid to a group of high school students who were survivors of a horrific gun attack in Florida. While they’re not the first students to suffer from such a crappy situation, what made this tragedy even more significant was that the students didn’t remain the backdrop of the event but have now taken front stage and are literally the movement itself.

This has resulted in a number of unexpected outcomes. First, the “usual” response of “this isn’t the time” to discuss gun violence was completely drowned out by the survivors themselves who refused to allow pro-NRA pundits to dictate the terms of the conversation. And the opposite side, the political operatives who have been screaming into the wind for decades about gun violence, were also taken a bit by surprise because as much as they have wanted to do so, they’re not dictating the message but having to listen alongside everyone else who is seeing this dynamic group of young people demand and focus attention.

And this is part of the problem that I fear because as Mancur Olson pointed out in “The Logic of Collective Action: Public Goods and the Theory of Groups” (1965) and reinforced by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in “Poor People’s Movements: Why They Succeed, How They Fail” (1977), getting a movement started is a lot easier than sustaining one over time. The reasons are varied, but there’s both a free rider problem (people think others will do the work for them so they sit out the movement, convinced someone else will take up the slack) and an age problem, which I’ll talk about it a moment here.

The first problem is not easily overcome. People organize because of personal motivations, and they quite often are faced with the belief that they’re climbing a mountain that has no footing. When they realize there’s a group of others with similar goals, they become motivated and feel the sense of belonging that makes them put themselves out there for hopes of a solution. What can often happen is that solidarity may actually lead to a limited success because their opposition is also overwhelmed by the numbers gathered in such a short amount of time. So, they go home, armed with the knowledge that they succeeded. But they don’t often get everything they wanted, so when they take to the streets again to achieve the rest, they find that a fraction of their comrades appear the second time around due to that pesky free rider problem.

Which brings me to the second problem: age. One of the advantages of the current movement is also its biggest liability: Children eventually stop being children. Right now, young high school students are rallied around the idea of wanting to fix things for the youth of America. But there’s a time stamp on how effective they are going to be because of the fact that once they stop being high school students and are then perceived to be adults, their message practically disappears overnight. People tend to care when children are affected, but when those children grow up into adulthood, it’s amazing how society quickly turns their backs on those same people.

Which means, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen really soon. The NRA, conservatives and those who like the status quo are very, very good at kicking cans down the road. This is kind of the origin of the phrase “thoughts and prayers”. The term “thoughts and prayers” has only recently been debunked to reveal it means “we’re not going to do anything about this now, so all we’re willing to do is pretend we’re thinking about it, but we’re not.” Historically, they’ve been really good at ignoring huge calamities with infamous responses of “now’s not the time” and all sorts of other bags of wind, knee jerk reactions. Therefore, if anything is going to happen, it’s going to have to happen during the next few weeks, or at least before the next atrocious event occurs because once the next geographically named event occurs, Florida will be yesterday’s news, and those who want to do nothing will breathe a sign of relief that they never actually had to do anything to make things better.