Almost All is Forgiven: Game of Thrones Season 6 (Spoiler Alert!)

Season 5 of Game of Thrones was pretty much a bummer.  It ended by "killing" Jon Snow but besides that it felt like hardly anything good happened.  It was mostly just a lot of shuffling around, spinning wheels.  You have to think in part they were hoping GRR Martin would get off his lazy ass and finish the next book already, which of course didn't happen.

Which probably helped to give them a green light to be more dynamic this season.  The finale especially helped to confirm numerous fan theories, perhaps the most important being Jon Snow's true parentage.  Basically Ned Stark was Uncle Owen or Joseph from the Bible, the guy who raised a kid who wasn't his and who has a great destiny ahead of him.  Though I had to ask Michael Offutt to explain to me what the hell was going on in that flashback because I wasn't up on all the backstory.  If Jon Snow is the half-brother of Danerys, then how's that going to affect who sits on the Iron Throne?

Though right now it's the evil Cersei on the throne.  It seemed like a third of the episode was dedicated to her.  Basically she went all Michael Corleone at the end of The Godfather and killed all her enemies in King's Landing in one fell swoop (which inadvertently included her own son) and then made herself the High Queen of the realm or whatever.  Which was pretty freaking awesome.

And hooray, Arya's back from training with Ra's al Guhl!  Though really when she got stabbed in the gut I hoped she'd die just to be rid of her.  Like all of the Stark (and Stark-ish) people she probably has grand destiny but the whole League of Shadows/Kung-Fu thing was so fucking lame I was glad just to be done with it.

And finally after six seasons, Danerys and her dragons (and a huge fucking armada) are heading for Westeros.  It was seriously about fucking time for that to happen.  I mean last year she got bogged down in Iraq Mereen and then she got captured (again) by Dothraki.  It was pretty awesome when she burned all the chiefs and then did her tough guy walk out of the tent completely unscathed to basically say, "Y'all working for me now, bitches!"  It was another sign that this season's motto was:  No More Fucking Around.  It was time to get down to business.

And good, Ramsey Bolton finally bought it.  The "Battle of the Bastards" was pretty crazy but at least the end result was good.  There was someone who definitely deserved to be eaten by his own dogs.  Though only after he killed Rickon Stark--if anyone remembers (or cares) who that is.  I was a little bummed at how quickly they dispatched that loudmouthed Wildling girl with him; she had been sort of a main character a couple seasons ago and then she's in like one scene and gets her throat slit.  I suppose that's just how it goes in Game of Thrones, which is why it's definitely not a universe I'd want to live in.  (The universe I'd want to live in:  Star Trek.  Probably the Next Gen because they had cooler shit.  Star Wars is second--only if I could get a lightsaber.)

The comeback of Jon Snow was a little underwhelming.  First, all that Melasandre chick did was give him a bath and say a prayer and he springs back to life.  Seriously?  Even the Bible was more dramatic than that.  Plus he came back from the dead but he doesn't have any superpowers (yet) and didn't even really get any rousing speeches.  The 10-year-old queen of Bear Island had a more rousing speech than him.  He didn't even seem to have a clue what he was supposed to do; if Ramsey hadn't sent a threat to Castle Black, he'd have probably just wandered around the rest of the series.

Anyway, after pissing me off last year, the series pretty much made up for it with this new concept of actually doing stuff.  Whoa!  Next year I hope they continue that.  Plus I hope they continue to dovetail some of these plots together and trim off some extraneous ones.  I'm sure there's some important reason to bring back The Hound, but was it really necessary?  Offutt says that Sam guy has a magic horn that's important, which is why I assume we need to keep going back to him--and also comic relief I suppose.  The Dorne thing was largely pointless as sure they gave Danerys some ships but she pretty much already had the ships she needed from the Masters/Iron Born.  The point is they need to get things moving so the last season can really concentrate on the battle with the Night King, which is where this has been heading all along, and then wrapping up.  Next season needs to set the table for that without getting bogged down in too much extraneous shit.

So just keep it up, Game of Thrones writers.  And if you want a lesson for writing, get off your ass and make things happen!  Which also means actually writing, unlike GRR Martin.  (That's probably why his initials spell grr because he makes fans go grrrrrrrrr at waiting so long for him to finish stuff.)

We’re Here. We’re Queer? Get Used to It!

According to recent polls, fans of the Marvel “cinematic universe” think Captain America (aka Steve Rogers) and his old buddy Bucky Barnes (aka Winter Soldier) should hook up. This follows Star Wars Episode VII where a lot of people thought Finn and Poe should hook up.

Part of this seems like an immature reaction people have whenever two characters work together really closely. Like all those years Mulder and Scully didn’t hook up on the X-Files there were gigabytes of fanfics hooking them up. There was probably just as much with Star Trek Voyager. (I’m kind of afraid to Google for Parks and Recreation fanfics hooking up Leslie Knope and Ron Swanson.) And then sometimes people get their wish like Lois and Clark or that one X-Files movie I never watched and people aren’t that impressed with it. Some people can’t seem to grasp that two characters can work together and just be friends.

But also I think it’s a sign that there are plenty of people who are ready for an LBGTQ (and however many other letters they’ve added since I wrote this) character in one of those big franchises. Because really I can’t think of one. The closest I can think of was one of the original Minutemen in Watchmen was a lesbian and brutally murdered in the credits for her “indecent lifestyle.” Even the X-Men, whose mutants are seen as a symbolic device for the LBGTQ community, doesn’t seem to have a character who is actually LBGTQ.

The reason for this is pretty obvious: Hollywood is pretty conservative. Individual stars might be liberal but studios are anything but. Think how long it took to get a Wonder Woman movie. Or a Black Panther movie. And while Wolverine is on his third solo movie Storm has zero solo movies. Or how people lost their minds over a black Stormtrooper and a black Johnny Storm. Then there’s all the whitewashing in movies like Gods of Egypt.

No one wants to be the guy who kills the golden goose, so as long as straight heroes are making tons of money for Disney, they have little impetus to add LBGTQ characters. The last thing they want is hard-line Christians picketing theaters and attracting a lot of negative news stories. Plus there’s always the risk of damaging foreign markets. That was the argument an exec used for whitewashing the role of the “Ancient One” in Doctor Strange: if we cast an Asian actor, Chinese people won’t go watch the movie! Um…yeah. Sounds like you’re straining to do some explaining.

But with polls like I mentioned so close together it points towards a hankering that will eventually have to be satisfied. Probably something small at first, like a secondary character, and then if sales are good a more mainstream character. I just wouldn’t expect to see Cap and Bucky lubing each other up anytime soon.

When the Media ASSumes They Do More Than Make An Ass of U and Me

Last month in the Stuff I Watched entry I talked about the ESPN 30 for 30 documentary Fantastic Lies about the Duke lacrosse scandal of 2006.  In case you didn't read that entry or you just forget, there was a party at a house outside of the Duke University campus in North Carolina.  The lacrosse team hired a couple of strippers, one of whom accused them of rape.  Once the media got the story they pretty much condemned the team long before the trial.  Except then it turns out the stripper was lying and the DA's case was pure bullshit he was spinning to get himself re-elected.  Eventually the prosecutor ended up in jail (for a day) and the stripper went on to murder a boyfriend and go to jail.  Meanwhile the lacrosse players had been pariahs for almost a year and their coach had been fired.

A big problem in this is the way the media crucified the players based on sketchy evidence.  With the 24-hour "news" cycle and papers owned by huge corporations, largely gone are the days where journalists carefully vet their stories and check their stories before they go to print or on the air.  To feed the endless news cycle or to get the scoop to sell papers, you have to be fast.  It's shoot first and apologize later if you hit the wrong person.

The problem is the apologies come too late, usually after anyone is paying attention.  In the meantime, people have their lives ruined.  Fortunately the Duke lacrosse players mostly came from money so they could afford the legal bills and still make a comfy life for themselves after that.  That was also part of what made them perfect villains for the Nancy Grace types.  Rich, white, lacrosse, Duke, and names like Reade vs. the poor black stripper trying to pay her way through a far lower college--it's a perfect movie script!  And that's probably where it should have stayed, as a work of fiction.

Maybe it wasn't really the first but the OJ trial was really the first I can remember where you had so much coverage and just about everyone (except the jury) had already decided he was guilty.  Not long after that you had the Clinton impeachment.  Remember the Olympic bombing in 1996?  The FBI fingered some guy and everyone thought he was guilty...until it turned out he wasn't.  In the meantime he pretty much had to go into hiding.  Michael Jackson, Robert Blake, Casey Anthony...all big cases where the media turned in one verdict and the jury another.  It probably doesn't hurt celebrities as much, but for more ordinary people it can pretty much screw your whole life.

Spotlight was another movie I watched last month.  That was about Catholic priests abusing kids.  The Boston Globe handled that story the right way by carefully building their case against the priests and only printing it when they knew they had it right.  It's too bad they doesn't happen more these days because when the media doesn't do that, they can ruin lives and it gives them as much credibility as The National Enquirer--if not less.

Fun Fact:  In the 3rd and 4th Scarlet Knight books, Hazards of Love and Change of Heart I deal with this issue a little bit.  In the third book Emma Earl was framed for murdering a bunch of people.  At the end of the book, even though she's been proven innocent, she still loses her job because the publicity made her a pariah.  At the start of the 4th book she can't get another job and she loses her apartment and winds up taking a dangerous job in Russia.

The Placebo of Education

Whenever I see an article about minimum wage on Facebook, there are always comments by those sneering jerks who say, “Well you shoulda got an education like me!” (Maybe 50% of the time they actually have all the spelling and grammar right.) It reminds me of the old Bruce Hornsby & the Range song “The Way It Is” with the lyrics:

Standing in line, marking time
Waiting for the welfare dime
'Cause they can't buy a job
The man in the silk suit hurries by
As he catches the poor old lady's eyes
Just for fun he says, "Get a job."

But over and over again I see “education” as the solution to the problem. Except getting an education and making it pay off is not as easy as people like to make it sound. Thanks to Republicans student loans are as cumbersome and punitive as payday loans anymore. Especially if you’re going into a field like medicine or law that requires post-graduate study and you don’t want to go to some Division II school like this guy. (Cardinal Pride! Woo!) I got lucky and went to a smaller school and between financial aid, scholarships, grants, and a part-time job I cobbled together enough money not to need a student loan until my final year when a couple of the grants ran out. Even then I think it was only $1700 or so. I think I paid it off about 2005 or maybe sooner so it wasn’t a huge burden like for a lot of people. Of course that was from 1996-2000 and tuition even at schools like SVSU has gone up exponentially since then.

(I think it was Real Sports on HBO that had a story on how much schools like Rutgers and Eastern Michigan throw away on subpar sports programs—mostly football—and to make up for it jack up tuition on students. At Eastern Michigan—just down the road from the University of Michigan—some students were sleeping on couches in lounge areas because they couldn’t afford housing. Meanwhile in states with conservative Republican legislatures they keep cutting back how much states give to public universities.)

So yeah, going to college is pretty much a shitshow anymore. If you have small children, better hope they’re really good at a sport so they can get scholarships. There’s no way you’re going to pay for it yourself, especially if you’re making $7.25 an hour, which has been the minimum wage for about a decade now despite how much prices have gone up on just about everything since then.

OK so paying for college is hard for most everyone. But isn’t it worth it? Maybe. The thing people commenting on Facebook ASSume is that getting an education instantly means you’ll be getting a good job. Hahaha! If only! I mean come on I have a Bachelor’s degree (magna cum laude even) and almost 20 years of experience and it took me pretty much 18 months to find a job for about half what I used to make. Along the way I tried working fast food for $8.15/hour but really couldn’t take the physical strain on my old, fat, diabetic body. (To which conservative commenters would say, “You shouldn’t be fat and diabetic then!”)

In my roughly 8-day stint in the fast food industry, you know how much I made? Less than $500. And a lot of that money went to buying slip-free shoes and black pants to go with the uniform shirt. If you start doing the math, can you really live on about $1200 a month? Maybe if it’s just you and you don’t have a car payment or student loans.

A scenario I brought up: what if you’re one of those middle-aged people who gets laid off from a factory like one of those Ford, GM, or Chrysler plants that went to China or Mexico? You have a spouse, kids, car insurance, health insurance, car payments, and a mortgage. Your $30/hour job with full benefits used to take care of all that but now until you can get that fabled college degree you’re supposed to make do with $7.25 an hour? And from experience I know places like McDonald’s or Wal-Mart can be pretty draconian with the scheduling. For instance at Target if you apply for a stock room job you have to available Sundays and you have to be able to start as early as 4am!

So probably the best thing would be an online program. Still there are costs for that and minimum wage—or even $8.15—isn’t going to cut it. Well just work 2 or 3 jobs! The conservative geniuses say. Have your wife or husband work a few jobs too! And maybe the kids can set up a lemonade stand.

But even if you get that degree after two years at a minimum, now you’ve got to start applying for jobs. You send in your resume and HR people see you’ve got 20 years of experience as a lathe operator or whatever but absolutely none as an IT professional. The Catch-22 when you graduate is employers want years of experience but how do you get experience if no one will hire you because you don’t have experience? It’s probably even harder when you go in for the interview and you’re 45 and the other candidates are 25 because the expectation will be that if you’re older you’ll want more money and benefits than a kid fresh out of college. And while you’re pounding the pavement looking for a “good” entry-level job, you still have all those bills to pay.

Let’s face it, everything is working against you, which is why “Get an education!” sounds like a good answer but like most simple answers it’s not always that practical.

Bringing it back to writing, my writers.net nemesis Jay Greenstein loves talking about education. He used to say I “hate education” until the fourth or fifth time I reminded him I have a Bachelor’s Degree—magna cum laude, bitches! Still, his standard “review” is to tell everyone they need education on writing because what they learned in school doesn’t cut it.

Whenever we argue about anything he inevitably says, “Well you can’t sell anything to publishers…” Always forgetting that A) I did sell something to a publisher (And Neil Vogler sold something else that I contributed to) and B) His only sale was to some crappy little outfit that went out of business about a year later and C) His self-published stuff hardly sells anything at all.

It never penetrates his thick skull that if education (especially the teachings of Dwight Swain) is all you need, shouldn’t he be a successful author? Except that obviously education is not all you need. Not to say that I “hate education” because it is helpful to be able to form coherent sentences. It’s just that education is far from the ONLY thing you need, just as education is hardly the ONLY thing you need to get a decent job. A lot of it in writing and job hunting comes down to good ol’ fashioned luck. Being in the right place at the right time. If the query you spent days writing and editing gets read when the agent’s minion was a half-hour late for work and spilled coffee all over herself, she’s probably not going to be as into your story than if she’s having a good day. That’s just human nature. Or maybe she’s reading the query on your zombie story just after they already selected another zombie story and thus they don’t want two.

Unlike what people like Greenstein say, it’s not all about technique. If it were, a lot of shitty writers wouldn’t be published. He’d say I think I know more than published writers—you’re damned right! Not the really good, Pulitzer Prize-winning ones, but someone like EL James? Some celebrity who decides one day she wants to be a novelist? Yeah, I think I know more than them. But that doesn’t matter when you get name recognition or good publicity on your side.

Author Lawrence Block pretty much said the same thing on his blog:

There’s no guarantee that any of us can do that. There are schools you can go to in order to learn a trade, and when you’re done you’re likely to qualify for a job in that field. It doesn’t work that way in the arts. You can take every writing course you can find, you can earn an MFA and hang the diploma on your wall, and you may never write a page that anyone will read with pleasure. This, alas, is the risk we all run.

And he's been selling stories since the late 50s, so he knows what he's talking about.

So really, let’s stop looking at this like it’s black-and-white because it’s obviously not.

Orlando & The Loss of Perspective

After the massacre in Orlando, there were the inevitable articles like this one on Medium titled: Why I Need an AR-15. Right in the title you have part of the problem. No civilian NEEDs a machine gun. You WANT one, but you can function easily enough without one; I’ve lived 38 years and never NEEDED a machine gun.

Giving the author the benefit of the doubt, what are the crucial reasons he needs an AR-15? Because it’s good for killing both feral pigs and small animals like groundhogs. There’s also target shooting and of course “home defense.”

The maddening thing about this article (and similar ones) is the complete lack of perspective. Fifty people are DEAD. Half as many were injured. Many more are going to be seriously traumatized. And that’s just one shooting; don’t forget about the carnage in Newtown and San Bernardino. But what’s a hundred or more human lives compared to your need to hunt pigs? And to blow paper targets to bits. And to be ready in case Russian paratroopers come down a la Red Dawn, which other than a zombie apocalypse is the only time you’d NEED a machine gun for “home defense.”

This is what happens when you become so desensitized to killing sprees that fifty lives no longer matter to you. It’s also part of a larger problem in our society where we can no longer distinguish between what we NEED and what we WANT. As with violence, we’re conditioned pretty early by TV to want the latest toy, fast food sandwich, shoes, and so forth. The trick of advertising is to turn that WANT into a NEED so you’ll go out and buy it. Or when you’re a kid, beg your parents for it. We have an entire holiday season dedicated to that.

The problem is people grow up but they don’t really grow up in that way. They still think they NEED the latest iPhone or TV. If you ask why they have “good” reasons too: it comes in rose gold! It has 4K! Never mind you’re getting along perfectly fine with your white iPhone or HD TV. You NEED the latest, “greatest” thing, especially before someone else on your street has it.

In this case you have people who NEED a machine gun for all the BS reasons described. The conditioning is so strong that they simply can’t weigh their “NEED” against the damage said product is actually doing. People like that seriously need a kick in the pants to wake them up to the fact there are a lot more people out there; it’s not all about YOU.

What you have to do is look at it objectively. Who benefits if we ban AR-15-type weapons? Well it would make it more difficult (not impossible) for psychos to get their hands on machine guns that can kill dozens of people in minutes. That would seem to benefit all of us who don’t want our lives cut short thanks to a killing spree. Who is hurt? People who don’t want to use two guns to kill pigs and groundhogs. Is it really that difficult of a decision?

People like the one who wrote that article and other morons on Facebook and such really should have to go up to the families of the victims and tell them why people NEED to have machine guns.  "I'm sorry your son is dead, but I NEED to hunt feral pigs and groundhogs."  Yeah, I don't think that'd go over well.  Or that well-worn excuse, "Well, it's too bad your child is dead, but that guy could have got the gun anyway, so why bother banning assault weapons?"  One thing I'm sure Obama is really glad about is having only 7 months until Hillary or Trump can be the one to go to the funerals and try to comfort the victims; gods help us if it's Trump.  How awful would that be for the families when he goes up there and says, "Well I told you this would happen if we didn't ban all Muslims.  Ha ha, told ya so!  I'm the greatest!!!"  Eek.

When the next massacre happens—and it will, sadly enough—all of us need to start acting like grownups and figure out the difference between WANT and NEED. In some cases it might save a life.

PS: On my Twitter I pondered why don’t these losers hunting with AR-15s use a REAL weapon like a bow? That’s how they did it in the old days. These same people claim hunting is a “sport” but what’s so sporting about shooting a pig with a machine gun? I could do that and the only hunting I do is on my Kindle Fire. You should get a sword and do it like the real old days. Sure it didn’t work out so well for Robert Baratheon in Game of Thrones, but then it’s a real contest between man and beast. Unless you’re just such a wimp you can’t kill a dumb animal with the same weapon your ancestors used. I’m just saying.