Is Selfishness The Root Of All Evil?

A little Offutt-style Doom & Gloom post! Here are a couple of local recent examples of pure, idiotic selfishness.

In my department there are only 3 of us because we've been horribly understaffed since the pandemic.  For a while it was just my nominal boss and me and then not quite a year ago they hired someone else.  A few months ago, I'm not sure why, but she suddenly got it into her head that whenever our nominal boss left the room, she could basically do whatever she wants.  She started turning up some crap on her phone and having loud personal conversations on the phone and cackling loudly and burping and chomping gum and so on.  

One day I decided to try to teach her a lesson so while she was at lunch and the nominal boss was gone, I got out my MP3 player and put it on fairly loud.  Now, does it occur to her that someone sitting 5 feet away making noise is annoying and obnoxious and have a moment of self-awareness?  No, she just turns her shit up louder.

Another day I got so tired of it I finally just shouted (pretty much unconsciously) "WOULD YOU TURN THAT DOWN?!"  And so maybe she'd realize this behavior is annoying and stop, right?  No, she just turn it down a couple of notches.  Because it's so important to get what she wants, which is listening to whatever crap on her phone and so forth.  It doesn't matter that it's bothering someone else; all that matters is getting what she wants.

Now, the other example is my neighbor across the hall.  When whatever woman he was living with moved out, all the sudden he decides that he doesn't need to put his dog on a leash anymore.  How one thing leads to another, I don't really know.  And he's been doing this for months.  I think you can guess what's going to happen with that:  inevitably the dog jumps on a person or another dog.  What this fool doesn't seem to realize is just because you don't see anyone right that moment when you open the door of the building or your truck doesn't mean no one will ever come along.

One Saturday I had the window open and I hear all this barking and shouting.  Guess who was involved?  This guy's dog.  I don't think it was a big scuffle, but still it's not something that should happen.  And guess what?  The very next day he's letting the dog run wild again.

Finally I emailed the landlord and a couple days later she sends out a text to everyone reminding them that their lease says dogs are supposed to be on leashes.  But I'm not sure that's really effective because who even knows how many people get the texts?  Anyway, you think this guy now is going to leash his dog?  Hell no.

Because again it's more important that he gets what he wants than being considerate of other people.  And really not to single him out, other people have done this too.  A couple weeks ago I saw two bulldogs racing past my window sans leashes.  And in the past other people have done this.  I don't know why; I've never lived anywhere else where people thought they could just let dogs run wild, despite how obvious it is that many other people are living there and it's very clearly NOT a dog park.

It is just pure selfishness.  People don't wanna put a leash on the dog and walk it, so they don't.  It seems inevitable that a dog is going to actually hurt another dog or bite a person, though I'm not sure that's happened yet.

So from there I go thinking that really this seems to be the problem with so many things.  Like all the terrible driving these days.  Selfish people want to get wherever and so they'll drive too fast, tailgate, pass in turn lanes/shoulders, or do all sorts of other idiotic things to get what they want--even though usually what they actually get is to stop at a light a little longer.

And just think of all the other instances of people being assholes in stores and restaurants and so forth.  This selfish need to get what we want eclipses basic decency and empathy and all that.  It makes us act like total assholes with no regard for anyone else.  All that matters is me, me, ME getting what I want.  

It just seems like so many people are like Veruca Salt in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory.  Maybe they don't actively go around shouting, "Daddy, I want a squirrel/goose!" but it's basically what they're thinking.  I want this, so screw whoever gets in my way!  And if you complain about their selfishness, you're the jerk and they'll just try to hide their selfish behavior a little better.

I don't know when this started happening, though obviously it's been happening for a long time.  It just seems a lot worse now.  Maybe we really are so much more spoiled and selfish than previous generations.  I don't know.  I'm just asking the questions!

Anyway, that's my doom and gloom post.  You're welcome.

The Second Worst Take On The Internet!

 A week or so ago I talked about the worst take on the Internet that involved some dork on Bluesky saying everyone with fewer than 100 followers (or whatever) was a troll.  Now on RogerEbert.com comes the second worst take!

So basically this "author" watched some TV recently and decided that in ads black couples were as rare as "unicorns" or "UFOs" or "Bigfoot."  Which I thought was utter bullshit.  And the "article" is utter bullshit because it is all anecdotal evidence.  It really is, "I watched some TV and didn't see this, so here's a think piece!"  And he quotes some other crap whining that there are too many interracial couples instead of black couples.  Because I guess he's part-racist against interracial couples?  Though admittedly I complained a couple years ago when companies like Amazon were suddenly showing interracial lesbian couples, which in real life probably are as rare as UFOs and unicorns.  Still, what is the problem of showing interracial couples?  It's not realistic compared to the population but it's a way for Madison Avenue to check two diversity boxes without a ton of extra casting.

More to the point, I started doing my own anecdotal evidence.  I mostly watch streaming TV like Pluto TV, Tubi, or Xumo but they all have ads.  It only took an hour or so to find my first "unicorn" in I think it was an Air wick ad.  Wow, if only it were so easy to find unicorns in real life!  Over the next 24 hours (though over half of that I was asleep or not watching TV) I saw about a half-dozen more though one was animated.

You might think, well only 7 in 10 hours or so of TV watching?  Well, consider how many ads you see that don't have couples at all.  Many have just one person or a group of "friends" who are usually of all races to check those diversity boxes (though you're unlike to see that in real life any more than lesbian interracial couples) or celebrities like Martha Stewart, Tina Fey, or Jay Leno (who looks terrible, BTW) or characters like Minions, Deadpool, or whoever else has a movie coming out.  And some ads don't show any people at all!

Now consider that I saw 7 black couples in however many commercials over 10 hours vs in real life what the percentage of black couples is in the real population.  Filter it further to those 7 in however many ads that featured couples at all and the percentage is probably higher than that of the real population.  My anecdotal evidence then would say not only are black couples not "unicorns" but they're over-represented compared to real life.  Which I'm not saying is a bad thing.  I didn't care at all until this idiot spouted off.

The problem with these lame think pieces is it relies on absolutely no evidence.  And because it's supported by a site using the name of a famous film critic, people will read it and think it's true.  When if people probably gathered their own anecdotal evidence like I did they would soon realize it's untrue.

It just seems like content-free bullshit quickly churned up because an author needs to meet a deadline or make a few bucks.  And in this case it's worse in a way than that other one on Bluesky because more people are likely to see it.

Anyway, if you read this, maybe you can start paying attention to the ads you watch and count how many unicorns you see.  What would be great is if a bunch of grad students or something counted the ads on various channels/apps and cataloged how many ads have black couples, white couples, interracial couples, or no couples at all for a week or two.  Then we could have real evidence instead of anecdotal evidence.  That's what the author should have done, but it's easier to just watch TV a couple of hours and spout some nonsense than to actually do it right.

Deep Thoughts On Other Stuff

 This is just kind of a "potpourri" post where I just briefly mention a few things.

Usually there's one commercial that airs a lot that I don't like for whatever reason.  Then hopefully after a couple of months it gets retired and something new takes its place.  Anyway, the one I really can't stand right now is for Glidden paint.  A guy asks his "friends" if they'll help paint the house.  And then a black woman sings, "Wow you got a lot of balls..."  And not to sound like Captain America but my thought is, "Language!"  I mean this is airing at like 6:30am on my local Fox station.  And sure "balls" isn't exactly a cuss word but I don't think you want your kids saying it because they heard it in some lame commercial.

And the commercial is lame.  I mean this guy's "friends" sing this crappy song telling him and his partner to "do it yourself with Glidden" and then leave.  I guess the point is that Glidden paint is easy to use?  But it's still going to take a while if you have to do it yourself.  And more to the point, why were the friends there moving in furniture before they painted the place?  Wouldn't you want to paint first so the paint doesn't get on the furniture?  This basically doesn't work on any level and I hope it dies soon.  Also, I'm committed now to buying any other brand of paint.

Speaking of commercials there's a Miracle Gro ad with Martha Stewart that I don't really hate.  Really I just think it's a good metaphor for revival movies.  Because in the ad there's a younger guy digging the soil to put in the plants (which it's funny that they use Bonnie brand cups but blur the labels) while Martha just puts her hands in a bag of dirt to say how great it is.  So you have a relatively unknown younger guy doing all the hard work and the old, recognizable star doing almost nothing but lending her name and star power.  Isn't that how it is with revivals like Star Wars, Terminator, Scream, or Ghostbusters?  The younger, lesser known actors do the hard work and the old people just show up to contribute a little mostly so they can be included in the promotional materials. 

Still speaking of commercials there's this lame anti-Biden ad that starts out saying, "President Biden took a wrong turn..." and I always want to add "in Albuquerque" like the old Bugs Bunny cartoons.  Later in the ad it shows Michigan senators Debbie Stabenow and Gary Peters.  In the picture is supposed to be the Capitol but it's blurred out like those Bonnie cups.  Why?  The Capitol is a public building, not a trademarked brand.  There should be plenty of public domain images.  The ad is about overturning a "ban" on new cars and at the bottom there's text saying it's sponsored by the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers.  Yeah, those guys don't have a dog in this fight.  They're just concerned citizens. lol

I follow critic/musician Jeff Tiedrich on Bluesky and he has basically made it his mission to destroy Donald Trump.  One thing he frequently mentions is Trump's nonsensical rambles during speeches.  Like one time he was ranting about sharks and electric batteries.  Or another time he made up some bullshit story about taking to tall, handsome pilots who told him about UFOs.  Beyond that are times Trump will just lose his train of thought or how he frequently gets names wrong and so on.  And it's not just Tiedrich noticing this; I read an article by a psychologist noting all the serious signs of dementia that Trump has.

And yet whenever the lamestream media covers a Trump rally or other speech, we only see a clip or two of his lucid moments.  Why do they not make this a major story?  I mean one of the main political parties nominee for president clearly has a few screws loose.  Why do they continue to enable him?  You'd think it'd be a huge story and yet it's been swept under the rug for most of 9 years.  But then this is also the lamestream media that has constantly downplayed Covid when with every other disaster--except Trump--they love to amp up the coverage to make people scared.  It goes to show just how corrupt and pathetic lamestream media from local papers to NPR to The New York Times and Washington Post are thanks to billionaires and corporations controlling most of the media.

Deep Thoughts After Rewatching Deep Space Nine On Pluto TV.

I rewatched DS9 a couple of years ago on Paramount+ but when I found out Pluto TV had a whole channel just for DS9, I couldn't resist rewatching some episodes.  Unfortunately the disadvantage over streaming is you can only see so many episodes and you don't get to pick which ones, so some I've seen a couple of times and many in the early seasons not at all.

Anyway, here are some random thoughts I had:

1. Vedek/Kai Winn is the perfect representation of the modern Republican party.  She's a nasty, scheming bully who first comes to the station to shut down Mrs. O'Brien's school by claiming that O'Brien shouldn't teach the science of the wormhole and "Prophets."  Basically she demands they teach creationism instead of evolution.  Later she schemes her way into becoming the religious leader of Bajor and uses that to gain more political power for herself.  All the while she claims to be religious and love the Prophets, she actually doesn't give a shit about them..  Sound familiar?
2. One episode in the 6th season I think is called "The Sound of Her Voice."  The Defiant picks up a distress call from a female captain.  Over a couple of days they take turns talking to her while she's slowly suffocating.  They finally get there only to find she's been dead for 3 years.  So...why didn't anyone look up her or her ship in the computer?  That would have told them the ship--and her--had vanished years ago.  But then we wouldn't have an episode, right?
3. In the big ship battle scenes I kept thinking, "Geez, I'd hate to be in one of those fighters or really old ships."  I mean they have these tiny fighter ships going up against the Klingons, Cardassians, Jem H'Dar, and Breen ships which have way more armor, shields, and weapons.  It really seems like you'd have to have a death wish to take a little fighter ship against those.  Then you have those ancient Excelsior-class and Reliant-class ships that are for some reason still around.  They've probably had upgrades in the last 100 years or so but still they were made in the previous century--back in Kirk's day!  They were designed for exploration and maybe fighting off an old Klingon K7 cruiser or something.  And they're supposed to be going toe-to-toe with much newer, more powerful warships?  Again, seems like suicide.
4. I think I said it on Facebook--or maybe on here--about one episode I think in the 4th season.  Sisko and Jake are in an accident in the Defiant's engine room.  Sisko disappears but keeps popping up during Jake's life but only for a few seconds/minutes.  Jake writes a famous book but then spends a lot of time trying to save his father.  And eventually does.  I was just thinking that in the end this is similar to what does happen to Jake's father, only instead of an accident, he goes to live with the Prophets in the wormhole.  And he probably doesn't periodically show up, though I suppose he could.  For Jake, he's left without his father, though by then there is Kassidy Yates and her baby, so not as alone.  But it was kind of a prophetic episode.
5. Something that started to bother me not just with DS9 but probably TNG and Voyager as well.  They use these "datapadd" things for reading and writing that are basically like iPads we have now.  Often you'll see a character with a whole stack of them.  Like Jake would have a bunch for his schoolwork.  Why?  It's the 24th Century; shouldn't they have padds with more memory and storage by now?  I mean characters should only need one padd to do everything, right?  Maybe if there's like secret encrypted shit on a padd it might not be online but most of the time it seems like you should just have one.
   
6. While the show did a good job developing the main characters, it also did a good job developing some of the secondary characters.  Rom is just Quark's brother at first who's just kind of a jerk to humans and mostly does what Quark wants.  But over time he finds a talent for engineering, gets married, and finally becomes Grand Nagus.  His son Nog was just supposed to be Jake Sisko's ne'er-do-well friend but then he decides to join Starfleet and becomes an officer.  General Martok was a bad guy at first when the Klingons turned against the Federation.  But later (once Worf and Garak rescued the real Martok from the Dominion) he became an ally, made Worf part of his house, and then became Chancellor of the Klingon Empire.  Then there's Damar who was just Dukat's aide at first and then his henchman who murders Dukat's daughter and then the puppet leader of Cardassia.  But in the final season he takes another turn, rebelling against the Dominion and becoming a legendary hero.  So all these characters started out pretty plain and developed whole stories.  It's kind of like The Simpsons where characters like Disco Stu or Cletus start out as one-off jokes but over time start getting more and more added to them.

Anyway, those are just some random thoughts I had.

The Worst Take In The History Of The Internet?

About a week ago I saw this post on Bluesky and thought, WTF?  I had seen some of this person's other posts in my "Discover" feed and they were pretty rational, but this one just came off as really dumb.  To me it says that anyone with fewer than 100 followers must be a troll and shouldn't be listened to.

But even if the hundred doesn't refer to followers it's still a pretty arbitrary metric to judge anyone's statement.  I guess you could say it's because I don't have a hundred followers that I'm sensitive about some line in the sand where people should listen to you or not.  But still let's break down some reasons why this is a bad idea.

1.  Not everyone on social media is trying to get tons and tons of followers.  Not everyone is trying to be an "influencer" or get famous/rich or sell shit.  On Twitter I had my author account with like 5000 followers or something.  Did I ever talk to any of them?  Not really--unless they overlapped with my personal account.  Did they talk to me?  Not really.  Did I buy their shit?  Probably not.  did they buy my shit?  Probably not.  And since it was an "author account" I tried not to post anything about religion or politics or stuff like that.  Mostly I just posted blog entries and sometimes book stuff.  

The point being, having just a bunch of "followers" was like having a bunch of "friends" on Facebook you never interact with.  It might make your number look good, but it doesn't really mean anything.  It certainly doesn't mean that a comment you make should carry more weight.

Really starting on the 8th a bunch of X accounts from Indonesia came over to Bluesky and when I blocked some of them (before I learned of how to just filter posts with certain keywords) I noticed some of these accounts would already have 100 "followers" and all they did was post FOLLBACK! LET'S BE MOOTS! or some shit like that.  But according to that post above, if one of those Indonesian accounts actually commented on something, it would count for more than my comment just because they have a bunch of fake "followers."

And let's not forget how many parents didn't vaccinate kids because some dumb D-list celebrity told them it caused autism.

2.  For me this post was kinda saying the quiet part loud:  POPULARITY IS WHAT MATTERS!  The quality of your argument doesn't matter if you don't have a bunch of followers.  That's just asinine, though probably true--see the paragraph above.  Popularity shouldn't make something true or false and I suppose that's a big part of our problem these days that you can hear so many opinions that it can be hard to decide what's true or not--"AI" only adding another layer to that.  But saying, "I only listen to the cool kids" is a pretty childish way to filter things.

3.  It's pretty divisive to say stuff like this.  One commenter took things a step farther by saying, "They should be restricted to each other until they crack that 100 count."  To me this smacks of that old Seinfeld line:  "They should have their own schools!"  So people like me who haven't gotten to this magical "hundred" yet should be second-class citizens on the site?  We should just sit down and shut up?  That's really segregationist, man.  Because again, getting back to previous points, having more popularity and "followers" doesn't make you wiser.  If that were true, Donald Trump and Elon Musk would be the geniuses they think they are.

Anyway, when you think about it, this is really one of the worst takes I've seen on the Internet.  And seemingly for no reason either.  This "advice" is utter bullshit, illogically creating a completely arbitrary metric to determine if someone's opinion is worthy or not.  Which in the end is another good reason to always take bullshit on the Internet with a grain of salt--like this post!

From reading some other skeets in the dude's account I guess he was suffering from severe IBS pain, so maybe the pain and meds just fucked up his thinking process.

Is Star Wars a Kid's Movie?

 This was a stupid debate on BlueSky a couple of weeks ago.  I'm sure this debate has been on other apps too.  Anyway, there were some calling Star Wars a "kid's movie" and others who disagreed.  I think mostly they were talking about the very first movie.

I don't really agree with that.  Most of the people who call it that seem to be doing it dismissively.  It's like the people who say superhero movies or comics are for kids.  And as I've said before, maybe that was true in the beginning but it is no longer true.

I agreed with someone who referred to it as "family friendly" in that it's a story that could be watched and enjoyed by kids and adults.  The movie is rated PG so it's not so kid-friendly that it's rated G like, say, Star Trek The Motion Picture.  There's violence and some cursing adjacent language like I think Han says "hell" at one point and if you think about it, Darth Vader would be pretty scary for little kids, especially that first scene where he comes out of the smoke and then when he's strangling people and stuff.  There's also Luke's aunt and uncle who are scorched corpses, a bunch of dead Jawas, and a bunch of pilots who get blown up, none of which seems very kid-friendly.  I mean, not a lot of "kid's movies" have a body count like a Tarantino movie.  So it's really not something for toddlers, though my brother probably watched it when he was a toddler--I wasn't born yet.  Of course some people have to exaggerate and say things like, "it features a giant teddy bear" referring to  Chewbacca.  Um, OK, they say that he rips off the arms of those who beat him at space chess.  And really he looks more like a Sasquatch than a "teddy bear;" that would be the Ewoks.

Really though the thing about the story is a lot of it is similar to various myths and legends.  The whole "Chosen One" story has been used for thousands of years.  Even the Bible has Chosen One stories, most notably the story of Jesus.  But really Luke isn't a Christ figure so much as a David using his slingshot (his X-Wing) against the Goliath of the Death Star.  And while there are versions of the Bible sanitized for kids, the actual book isn't a "kid's book." 

Of course Star Wars movies have always included kid-friendly elements like funny droids, goofy aliens--Jawas, Yoda, Ewoks, Jar-Jar, Porgs, etc--and fairly simplistic stories.  But writing them off as "kid's movies" just seems too much to me.

But what do you think?

Why Are Tech Companies Sabotaging Themselves--And Users?

 Maybe you've noticed the last few years that Google kinda sucks.  Just about every time you search for something, the top results are going to be sponsored and the results probably aren't as good as they were years earlier.  When I was writing The Swapped Ranger, a gender swap story in the Old West, I needed to look up some things like what Native American tribes lived in west Texas in that time and about what kind of guns were around and stuff like that.  In the old days I probably would have gotten a pretty good answer right away but now it seemed like I had to do a lot more work to find a satisfactory answer.

Maybe you've lost touch with "friends" and even family on Facebook because you hardly ever see their posts--and vice-versa.  I recently ran a test on my Facebook and posted an article about the degradation of Facebook and challenged people to like it.  How many did?  2.

According to random people on Bluesky, Instagram has likewise been getting a lot worse.  And we've all seen how terrible Twitter X has gotten since Musk took it over.  Recently he decreed that porn would be allowed on the site--with a couple of weak caveats.  In response the government of Indonesia said it would shut down X in that country, which caused a flood of Indonesians to migrate to Bluesky.

Getting back to Google, now they're using "AI" to provide instant "answers."  The problem is the answers are quite frequently utter bullshit.  Not surprisingly people have been challenging the machine brain to fool it and it doesn't seem that hard.  Someone(s) got it to recommend glue--yes, GLUE--on pizza if the cheese is falling off your pizza.  Someone(s) else got it to say that you should eat a few small rocks a day.  Rocks!  Maybe put some glue on your rocks?

Meanwhile Microsoft is trying to force a feature called Copilot+ on Windows 11 Users that has "AI" track all your activities.  But don't worry, they aren't going to upload that information so it'll be totally safe!  Uh-huh.  Some reactionaries have begun uninstalling Windows for Linux--so how long until Linux does something terrible?

It seems just about every tech company is making their products worse and worse.  There's an interesting term I wasn't familiar with called "Rot Economy."  Here's a definition from someone's tech newsletter:  

Rot Economy — the illogical, product-destroying mindset that turns the products you love into torturous, frustrating quasi-tools that require you to fight the company’s intentions to get the service you want.

It seems like basically this is when tech companies degrade products, mostly so they can push ads.  Not surprisingly this is usually done by people who aren't really software engineers or anything like that.

I'd say they're going to kill the golden goose, but that seems difficult when pretty much everyone is doing it.  What can YOU do about it?  Stop using the app or website, basically.  Be like those people dumping Windows for Linux.  That's probably too much effort for a lot of people though.  To me it seems like some are more vulnerable than others.  I mean, how hard is it to make a search engine?  It's pretty basic shit; I mean we've had them in one form or another for 30 years.  There was AltaVista, Yahoo!, and others before Google came along, so how hard would it be for a new one to be created?  There are other social media apps but maybe not the same as Facebook.

A newsletter I got about two weeks ago made some interesting points about the rot that's been going on since at least 2019.  But it also made me think of something else.  Borrowing from the famous Reagan speech, "Is your social media better than it was 15 years ago?"  

I joined Facebook and Twitter in 2009 when I was trying to promote Where You Belong.  The thing is when I think about it, did either site really improve much since then?  I'm sure they added some minor tweaks that might have been good, but I can't really think of a lot of new things they added that I used.  They probably added video and stuff like that but I never really used that much.  So at least to me there hasn't been any significant improvement in all that time.  Thanks to the rot and Elon Musk (the human embodiment of rot) both sites are in some ways worse than back then.

Something that newsletter talked about was tech seeking growth and expanding into new frontiers.  But a lot of those frontiers Big Tech has swung for the fences but at best hit a double or single.  In the last 15 years think of all those "revolutionary" products:  voice assistants (Siri, Alexa, OK Google), Google Glass, smartwatches, virtual reality (the "Metaverse"), and now "AI."  When those products were coming out, there were big promises of how they would change our lives.  Buuuut, Google Glass just caused people to fall down or get hit by cars; voice assistants couldn't understand users or wasted more time than just doing it yourself; smartwatches are good for some things but there's only so much people really want to do with a 2-inch screen; and virtual reality so far is expensive, can cause medical problems, and just looks pretty cheesy.  Even electric cars probably over-promised how much users would save and how much better they were than older models.  As for "AI" there have been a lot of promises about all the great things it will do but so far all it does is pump out wrong answers, mediocre images, and vapid stories.

Those misfires or just meh products are probably helping to fuel the rot as well.  Since most or all of these companies are public, they need to generate profits and growth.  When your ballyhooed product fails or just does OK then it's incentive to try to wring more money from your main product to even the score.  Some like Google and Facebook do like the Borg (or Microsoft) and just assimilate other successful companies to add their distinctiveness to their own.  But how long can they burn through cash on bad ideas and buying up successful ideas?  Meanwhile the rot is only weakening their core products, which ought to leave them vulnerable to competition.

Though tech companies aren't the only ones suffering from rot.  Plenty of big companies have been rotting for decades by outsourcing to other countries for cheaper labor, using cheaper materials, shrinking portions, and so forth.  Meanwhile they'll raise prices more and more.  Boeing is a good example of a company that has significantly rotted, as has become evident from its spate of plane failures and the failure of its Starliner program.  The "Big 3" had plenty of rot going for the latter 30-40 years of the last century.  So there's plenty of rot to go around. 

Revisiting Older MCU Movies Highlights Its Problems

Back in May for no real reason I started rewatching some of the movies I own on Amazon, most because I got a digital copy when I bought the Blu-Ray/DVD.  It really started with Force Awakens on May 4th but then eventually I got to some of the MCU movies I own, which I haven't rewatched very often.

When I rewatched Age of Ultron and Ant-Man & the Wasp some of the problems with the MCU occurred to me.  The biggest problem is even when they started doing 2-3 movies a year, that's still very little storytelling time versus the comics.  Because a comic book series usually has one issue a month or sometimes bi-weekly or (rarely) even weekly.  Characters--especially Spider-Man--often appear in multiple books too, both solo and team books.  That gives the writers plenty of chances to develop stories and characters.

But with the movies, there wasn't much of that so the stories tend to be pretty thin with some subplots and characters that didn't see much development or really have much payoff.  Like in Age of Ultron there's a whole subplot about Black Widow and Dr. Banner hooking up.  Which led to...nothing.  Hulk disappears until showing up in Thor Ragnarok 2 1/2 years later.  When Widow and Banner are finally reunited in Infinity War six months after that, nothing is really mentioned about that. 

Also in Age of Ultron a new Avengers team is formed with War Machine, Falcon, Vision, Scarlet Witch, Black Widow, and Captain America.  That team gets exactly 1 onscreen mission (which they bungle) in Civil War a year later and then they're broken up.  So not much of a payoff there.

Scarlet Witch was introduced in Age of Ultron but didn't really get much development other than to say her parents died and she got funky powers.  Vision saves her in the end and then in Civil War they have a couple of scenes before choosing different sides.  And then for some reason they're together in Scotland in Infinity War and then Vision dies and then Scarlet Witch dies until being brought back in the end of Endgame.  Then there was the whole WandaVision thing that just brought in a bunch of stuff out of left field to make her more into the comic book version.  And then she does a heel turn in Dr. Strange 2 before dying. It was overall just some real half-assed character work for her and Vision, who had even less opportunity to develop.

Watching Ant-Man & the Wasp the problem with this whole franchise has been its connection to the MCU.  After the first movie, which only had one forced MCU cameo, the Ant-Man universe is thrown into disarray when he goes to Germany in Civil War and gets arrested.  Then there was the whole Endgame thing and the MCU's desperate need to establish Kang as the next big bad--how did that work out?  So if you think about it, the series never had a chance to progress naturally because they had to keep working around all the MCU stuff.  Ant-Man & the Wasp was still good because it didn't have to do too much but Quantumania had to take on so much MCU business that it really sunk the whole thing.

And thinking about it, the Russos probably did more to fuck up the MCU than anyone.  In their first outing, Winter Soldier, they destroyed SHIELD, which fucked up the TV series at the time.  And also it limited the usefulness of characters like Nick Fury and Maria Hill.  Then in Civil War they broke up the Avengers team established only about a year earlier and had several characters end up imprisoned.  Then in Infinity War half the universe is destroyed.  Then in Endgame there's the infamous "blip" where all these people were brought back--but lost 5 years.  That really fucked up the movies and TV shows that came out after, most of which had to in some way address that problem.

Of course they did all that with the blessing of Kevin Feige, but there were a lot of unintended consequences that other movies/TV shows had to deal with.  And really that probably weakened the storytelling a bit, which you could say has contributed to their slump in the last couple of years.

Anyway, I'm just saying when you look back, you can see where the overall plots are sometimes pretty thin and things don't really pay off and characters aren't really given time to grow.  What the MCU has accomplished is still pretty amazing, but it's definitely not perfect.

Winning Can Sometimes Be A Problem

I read this blog entry during the A to Z Challenge about TSR, the company that the founders of Dungeons & Dragons originally created.  A few days before that I had also watched BlackBerry, the story of Research in Motion who created the BlackBerry smartphone.  I noticed the similarity where both companies started out as just a few nerds getting together and making something cool--role-playing games and electronics--but once they had a big success, things started to fall apart.  And you can add a lot of other companies to that list like Apple.

While I don't think most of us would say that winning is bad, it does tend to create problems.  TSR, RiM, Apple, etc. have some success and then within a few years tensions start to rise.  Where once you had a small group who could basically do what they wanted because no one cared, now there are employees, investors, the press, the government, and of course fans to answer to.  Success creates a need to keep coming up with new product, which creates pressure, especially when the new product isn't as successful.  And then if you already had some personality conflicts, that can lead to division.  TSR and Apple both fired a key founder in the mid-80s--Gary Gygax and Steve Jobs respectively.  One of RiM's lesser founders left in 2007, which turned out to be good for him as he cashed out just before RiM's stock tanked.

And of course it's not only in the corporate world.  Think of the Beatles.  They started as just four teens in Liverpool playing pubs and other small gigs.  Then suddenly they're the biggest band in the world.  That created pressures and personality conflicts that led to their breakup.

Or think of sports.  When a team wins a championship, it's great, but once the celebration is over then there's the pressure to do it again.  Very few teams can do it again because it is so difficult.  To do it 3 times or 4 times in a row is nearly impossible, which is why so few have done it.

If you don't like sports, business, or the Beatles, think of Star Wars.  After the first movie (Episode IV) the Rebels blew up the Death Star.  Now what?  That was the question everyone was wondering after the movie became such a big hit.  I think Lucas and the writers got it right in that they knew they couldn't keep the status quo.  Han and Chewie couldn't go back to smuggling.  Luke couldn't go back to Tatooine.  Leia definitely couldn't go back to Alderaan.  So they had Luke learn to be a Jedi and then find out his father is Darth Vader.  Han and Leia start getting romantically involved--until Han is captured and put into carbonite.

What Disney struggled with was after Episode VI the Rebels had blown up another Death Star and the Emperor and Vader were dead.  Now what?  Because they gave themselves so little time to do anything, they just tried to vaguely throw something together and it wound up being pretty disappointing.  They basically did exactly what I said not to do after Episode IV by essentially regressing the original characters to where they began.

In books--especially a series--you have this problem.  Your characters might "win" but that only means more obstacles lie ahead.  And unless you're writing something like Nancy Drew or the Hardy Boys or something like that, you aren't going to keep things static.  Characters and their world should continue to grow and change.  The hero(es) should face new threats and more difficult challenges.

In the Tales of the Scarlet Knight series, characters die, other characters are added, Emma has three different jobs, gives birth to one child, and adopts another one.  I kept raising the stakes in her world to create drama and conflict.  And as I say, there's really no going back.  Emma couldn't just go back to how she was at the start of the first book.

In the Chances Are series, the changes were often literal.  Steve becomes Stacey in book one.  Then in book two Stacey becomes a child and then a woman again.  In book three she becomes a child, an old woman, a man, and then back to a woman.  We did sort of retcon her body back to the original Stacey, but the rest of her world had changed as well.  Not many characters died but Dr. Palmer became a tween, Maddy became a little girl and then a chubby woman who found out her best friend was really her "dead" father.  And of course Stacey fell in love with her therapist and married him.  Maddy finally married her long-time girlfriend Grace who even got pregnant with Stacey's husband donating his sperm.

In the Girl Power series, there were literal changes for most of the characters.  Also at the end of the third book, much of the world has been devastated, so when I did sequel short stories and a spinoff book, characters had to adjust to this new world.

In the Children of Eternity series there are literal changes as Samantha and her friends grow up a little more with each book.  Also with each book, Samantha finds more clues about her past.  The island of Eternity's world grows as well when they finally go to the mainland and find out about modern times.  Unlike when Reverend Crane was running the place, they couldn't just wipe their memories and reboot every time they started to remember stuff.

To use a series that isn't one of mine, Lloyd Alexander's Prydain series starts out sort of like Star Wars (which came out years later) with young Taran living on a farm as an "assistant pig keeper."  Through the first three books he meets a bratty princess (who is not his sister), a king/bard, a warrior prince, and a weird creature called a Gurgi.  They have some adventures and Taran learns about the real world and what it is to be a hero.  Then in the fourth book he goes off on a quest to learn about himself and winds up learning a couple of trades like blacksmithing and starts to become more of a mature adult.  Then in the final book, he (spoiler alert) finds out he's the heir to the High King's throne.  So the world of Prydain and the characters kept growing and changing.  (Other people would probably use the Harry Potter books there, or maybe Narnia, LOTR, or Oz, but whatever.  It's my blog.)

The point being that like in the real world, in stories your hero "winning" usually creates more obstacles and complications.  As the author you want to keep raising the stakes to create the drama to fuel the plots.  Especially in a series there's usually the pressure to do more, to go bigger.  That can be hard to do sometimes.

Sometimes someone might try to go smaller and it's not really a good idea.  Like Alien3 where they went from the big military battles of Aliens to more of a claustrophobic slasher movie in space like Alien.  And also they killed almost all of the characters who survived Aliens.  Generally people hated it because it was trying to lower the stakes, trying to go back to the first one instead of expanding.

Halloween (2018) did the same thing.  After various attempts to expand the franchise, this basically reset everything back to the first movie--or tried to.  And it was really boring--at least to me.

Rocky V sort of did the same thing.  Instead of fighting for a heavyweight championship or fighting to avenge his dead friend, Rocky Balboa fought...some guy in a street.  It was really a downer and eventually even Stallone had to admit it and backtrack with Rocky Balboa in 2006.

Which really in movies and comics especially if you screw up your series, you usually wind up having to hit the reset button with a reboot or soft reboot.  For a really long-running series like Superman, Batman, or James Bond that is probably inevitable because it's hard to keep anything going for 85 years without a few reboots along the way.  So story universes are not like the universe itself, which is infinite or nearly so; there is a finite point where they hit the wall and you've basically gone as far as you can go and either have to quit or reboot.  Sales figures usually tell publishers, movie studios, etc. where that is.

It's like in Last Action Hero when the kid tells the fictional Jack Slater that the sequels will keep going and keep getting tougher until the grosses go down.  Which is great for the audience but kinda sucks for the characters.

Some food for thought.

Is the Former Founder of Twitter an Elitist A-Hole or a Victim of Circumstance?

Last month Jack Dorsey, the co-creator of Twitter, left BlueSky, which was basically the same as old Twitter.  In an interview he complained about the platform "making the same mistakes" like not being free or an open development platform and moderating comments and stuff. 

The original interview was on some tech site that you and I have never heard of.  But soon it was picked up by more well-known outlets like Business Insider and people were talking about it on Bluesky, especially the part where he describes people who went from Twitter to Bluesky after Musk's takeover as "a common crowd."

The reaction was pretty negative.  "What an asshole!" people said.  "He wants 'open Internet' to protect Nazis and trolls, etc."  And people post their snide comments and write thinkpieces.  Even I wrote a blog entry I'll share later.

But then days later I read this article from a guy who sorta knows Dorsey and was present for a lot of the interviews for hiring people of Bluesky and stuff like that.  So someone who probably knows what he's talking about.

If you can keep your eyelids open at all the tech jargon, what you start to understand is a lot of what Dorsey said was taken out of context.  Especially stuff like "open Internet" and "common crowd."  And then you know how these things go:  one person misinterprets something and tells someone else who tells someone else and it spreads like a disease.

All the jargon in the article aside, I think what happened is Dorsey was talking to some tech reporter from a tech site and so they were basically just talking shop.  Thus he wasn't parsing this for mass consumption.  Or you could say, dumbing it down for people like me and most Phantom Readers.  Like if a doctor is talking to someone from a medical journal they're probably going to use more medical terminology and such than if they're talking to someone from a local newspaper.

The problem in this case is then people who aren't all that tech savvy get a hold of it and see a rich white guy complaining about the "common crowd" and "free speech" and naturally their reaction is going to be, "What an elitist asshole!"  Because those people--including me--wouldn't know a "protocol" from a Bulgarian dildo.  Actually "protocol" just makes me think of C-3PO in Star Wars.

If you actually know what it is then it makes a little more sense.  I think basically what he's wanting is for everyone to sort of curate their own experience by having their own set of algorithms to filter things instead of relying on human moderators, which is different than a completely lawless, unmoderated Internet.  And the "common crowd" probably just meant people who are not tech savvy.

But the problem, as I'm sure many writers are aware of, is it's easy for people to misinterpret things.  Once people do, especially with someone fairly high profile, then it can be hard to correct.  And I'm willing to bet Dorsey isn't doing himself any favors on X right now.  He probably just needs to hire someone who can explain what he actually meant in plain English--or close to it.

Anyway, you can read what I originally wrote, which is now probably out of context, but still I think it's a good point about the need for some moderation--at least until someone figures out all this "protocol" bullshit.

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Last month Jack Dorsey, the co-creator of Twitter, left BlueSky, which was basically the same as old Twitter.  In an interview he whined about the platform "making the same mistakes" like not being free or an open development platform and moderating comments and stuff.  So then he crawled back to Twitter, aka X, to join in whining about "free speech" with fellow rich non-genius troll Elon Musk.

People want to make this an argument and obviously Dorsey and Musk want to think this is a real complicated issue, but it's not.  It's a pretty open-and-shut case.  And a real fucking hard no when it comes to social media platforms being "open" with no moderation.

To boil it all down simply you could ask Dorsey and Musk:  how many security guards/bodyguards do you employ for yourself, your family, your buildings, your megayachts, etc.?  How many of your homes are protected by gates?  What kind of security systems do your homes, cars, megayachts use?

If you care so much about "openness" then why do you protect all your stuff?  Because common sense (and a glance at any newspaper or local news broadcast) would tell you that there are bad people out there who would take your shit if they thought you didn't have any protection.  I mean if word got around that Dorsey's mansion didn't have any gates or locks or security alarms, how long do you think it'd take someone to drop by and empty the place out?  Basically as long as it'd take to get a truck there.

Yet for some reason, Dorsey and Musk and others want us to think the Internet is a better, more wholesome place.  Despite that it's very obviously not.  A short film I find amusing on the Rifftrax site is called The Kid's Guide to the Internet.  It was made in 1997 and is super cheesy.  It's funny to see all the old sites but also sad to remember all our hopes for the Internet.  "I can research stuff for school!"  "I can find out what's going on with my favorite TV shows/movies!"  "I can email the president!"  And 27 years later we have disinformation, spam, scams, trolls, incels, hate, and porn instead.  But even this silly movie 27 years ago warned the kids that they should only go to sites their parents approved.  Why?  Because even on a stupid movie like that they knew there were bad people on the Internet.  It was definitely not the sort of place you'd want your kids to have open access to then and certainly not now.

The simple fact is, as I've been witness to, when you have a universe with no physical consequences for your actions, people will tend to be their worst selves.  I've said before, I've been in flame wars since 1996 on the Transformers Usenet group.  I'd say I didn't intentionally start any of those--but I tried to finish them.  So I know what I'm talking about.  

Think of these groups--or now social media platforms--like a bar.  If you went into a real bar and started arguing, you risk getting punched, kicked, hit/stabbed with a bottle, or even shot.  But on the Internet you don't run any of those risks.  So you get a lot of "keyboard warriors" who have a lot more courage than they do in real life (looking at me here!) to fight with people.  Because what's going to happen to them if there's no moderation?  You going to call the FBI?  Oooh, I'm soooo scared.

Really from about 2006-2015 there was rarely any moderation on Writers.net.  Guess what would happen?  You'd have flame wars that would last for weeks.  Or sometimes it'd burn for a few days and then cool a little and then some jackass would start things up again.  Point being, with no moderators to give people a time out, it could drag out for a long time.  And usually it'd evolve from whatever the starting topic is to something else and something else and probably a lot of personal attacks and stuff.  In the end what would happen?  Everyone would just go to their corners to wait for the next round.  And so it'd go.  Some people enjoy that and sometimes it could be fun but eventually even I got fairly tired of it.  It was no surprise the site lost a lot of users to basically become a ghost town.  I mean, who really wants to keep being around all that drama and stuff?  

Even Dorsey noted that after the Musk takeover of Twitter a lot of people began going to Bluesky.  Why?  Because they didn't want to deal with the drama.  They just wanted to make their posts and shit and not worry about trolls, pervs, racists, incels, scammers, spammers, and the rest of the freak show Musk wanted to bring back.

Which brings up the point:  most people don't want "open" Internet.  Granted they don't want things too heavily moderated, but they don't want no moderation either.  Again, if you think of a social media app like a bar, moderators are like the bouncers to eject those who get out of line.  Do you really want to go to a bar where anyone can do whatever they want?  It's like the club in Roadhouse before Patrick Swayze/Jake Gyllenhaal gets there.   And for some people that's fun, but for most people it's not much fun and thus they aren't going to stay very long.  So you end up with a clientele of scumbags and jerks.  And I guess still some hangers-on who don't want to lose the following they still have.

Anyway, I think it's a pretty easy issue.  Moderation exists because people will naturally be assholes if there's no one to keep them in check.  That's true in real life and in online life too--especially in online life.  You have to wonder if Dorsey and Musk are so stupid that they can't see this or they just want permission to be the biggest trolls they can be.  I'm leaning towards the latter.