Accidental Historian

I'm Back, Baby!

Well, after a fashion, that is.  I've decided to decamp and head over to Wordpress because, well, reasons, mostly.  So from here on out you can find me right here:

http://accidentalhistorian.wordpress.com/

Stop on over.  Set a spell.

Friday Music Thingy

So I haven't checked in for a while.  I have a bunch of things floating around in my brain, but I haven't had the time or the desire to actually write about them.  Instead I'd like to offer an exercise in subjectivity.

1.  Awful, just awful



Note that this song was recently in a Bud Light commercial.  Think about it.  No you think about it.

2.  Not awful but not so much good.  [Most likely NSFW]



The first time I heard this song it tricked me into thinking it was good.  The second time I heard it I thought, "Y'know, this reminds me of that time I accidentally discovered Halestorm."  That's not good.  I kinda like the chorus, though.  And the bit towards the end where she goes "C'mon, bitches."  The song as a whole, though, is, um, how do I put this delicately?  Kinda crap.  The rest of the band's catalog goes rapidly downhill from here, too.  But they are named Morningwood, so they get points for that.

3.  Good but not great.



Pandora's been throwing TAT at me of late, mostly because I like the Dollyrots, Veruca Salt, and Letters to Cleo.  The song that actually sold me was "Pessimist," but there aren't any good YouTube videos of that song, so have "Road to Paradise."  It's not great, but it's not bad. It's...pleasant.

4.  Getting there.



So the thing about The Donnas is that I assumed they were something of a gimmick.  Pandora's been throwing them at me for a while, but I was all, "The Donnas?  They're probably a gimmick, amirite?"  Turns out that they're exactly as much of a gimmick as The Ramones or The Fratellis, in that they've known each other for 20 years, have been a band for roughly that long, and decided to choose the same name and then give the band that name because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

I've decided to give into The Donnas and I think it's one of the better decisions I've made this year.

5.  Hell, yeah.



I'm genuinely embarrassed to put that dude's hair on my blog.  But I only have 13 readers and I think four of them are Dennis Markuze, so why the fuck do I care?  Either way, my two favorite music discoveries of 2013 are the Dollyrots and Gaslight Anthem.  "Satellite" is one of my favorite Dollyrots songs.  I could listen to it every day.

Also, on the Oh.  My.  God.  scale, Kelly O is pregnant and the emo haired guitarist is the baby daddy.

6.  Oh, god, yes.



So this week I found out that Veruca Salt announced they're back together.  In March.  To the smallest possible amount of fanfare.  I mean, I put up a post that included Veruca Salt music videos on New Year's Eve of 2012 and I've been listening to Eight Arms to Hold You almost daily since then but I heard nothing about the reunion until this week.

Either way, Veruca Salt have reformed.  Original Veruca Salt.  Louise Post, Nina Gordon, Jim Shapiro, Steve Lack Veruca Salt.

I'm looking forward to the reunion tour on levels approaching the Soundgarden reunion of the past couple years.  It's a bit tempered by the bit where VS had a smaller library than Soundgarden and that includes the post-breakup albums.  But, good, god, man, I could listen to "All Hail Me" three times in a row live and consider that time well spent.



So.  Fucking.  Grunge.

Either way, that's a tour through my brain.

Music is subjective and sometimes the difference between great and terrible is both arbitrary and fuzzy, but that is what it is.  I also suppose there might be someone out there who thinks Halestorm is great and Veruca Salt sucks.  That person has every right to their opinion.  I won't take suggestions from him or her, though.  Or if I do I won't give the bands in question any money without a thorough examination.

Pacific Rim

I grew up dreaming of mecha.

BattleTech was my intro to the world, but it wasn’t my only outlet.  Still, it was my primary vehicle for understanding the simple idea that giant mechanical battlesuits punching things in the face are awesome.  I don’t know when, exactly, it began, but I do know it started with a copy of CityTech.  I didn’t read the rules the first time I tried playing and, as such, I had no fucking clue what was going on.  Still, I was hooked on the idea of BattleMechs.

The ‘90s were not necessarily a good time to be in love with that sort of thing.  I read all of the BattleTech novels and I filled my imagination with the ‘Mechs and their MechWarriors.  When I was in eighth grade English class we were supposed to journal our thoughts at the beginning of class every day.  Instead I wrote the origin story of the Goliath Marauders,[1] my Inner Sphere mercenary unit.  It was pure fanfic, but it did lead me to write the sci-fi company that published the BattleTech novels and attempt to get published.  I received a form letter with highlighter marks indicating the important parts.

I never wrote that BattleTech book.  I mean, I started it, but I never finished it.[2]  I can say that about a lot of other things I’ve done since then.

When it came to the wider world nothing quite lived up to my imagination.  I fondly recall Robot Jox and Robot Wars, which were about the closest anything came to living up to my BattleMech dreams.  I watched the BattleTech cartoon and EXO Squad.  As I got older and computer games were more of a thing there were the MechWarrior and MechCommander games, which were pretty good but still…blocky and somewhat less than immersive.[3]

I briefly got into Gundam, but I’ll just lay this out right now: anime isn’t my thing.  I’ve seen enough to know what’s going on but, for whatever reason, I never wanted to get too far into that world.  Why?  I don’t know.  Life’s like that sometimes, y’know?

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I’ve known about Pacific Rim for the better part of a year.

From the moment I learned about it I wanted to know more.  I watched every trailer I could find.  I watched them all multiple times.  I went to the website and clicked on every link I could find, hoping in vain to see more.

I knew three things: there were monsters, there were humongous mecha, and the monsters and humongous mecha punched each other in the face.  I was in love.

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The entire Godzilla genre passed me by almost entirely.

I wasn’t that interested in movies that featured guys in rubber suits stepping on cardboard cities.  Still the weird cross-cultural-contamination that comes from life as a geek left me aware of the genre and its attendant tropes.  Some of it came from MST3K.  Some of it came from that episode of Arrested Development where they were trying to convince the Japanese investors that Sudden Valley had more than a single model home.  Some came from reading what other geeks who did care had written about the movies about giant monsters destroying Tokyo.

That’s the great thing about life as a geek.  I cared about BattleTech.  I knew that BattleTech came from RoboTech and Super Macross and all that, but I didn’t have to care.  I knew that BattleTech shared a sort of cultural niche with Godzilla but I didn’t have to care.  I dreamed of BattleMechs and I knew that other people dreamed about Godzilla and we could all have our own dreams.

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I knew that Pacific Rim had nothing to do with my beloved BattleTech.

When I dreamed of humongous mecha I dreamed about piloting a Battlemaster and leading a company, battalion, or regiment against another similar unit comprised of similar humans piloting similar machines.  My world of humongous mecha didn’t fight monsters.  They fought other humans with their own goals, desires, dreams, and plans.

When I dreamed of humongous mecha I dreamed of people who became monsters to fight other humans who also became monsters.

As such, there’s absolutely no reason why I should have waited for Pacific Rim with the sort of taught, active anticipation that marked the past few months of my life.

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The older you get the more you learn that anticipation is the enemy.  At least, the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve learned that anticipation is the enemy.  Anticipation leads to expectation.  Expectation leads to overestimation.  Overestimation leads to disappointment.

I’ve learned to make expectation management a key component of all things I do.

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I was in Dallas a couple weeks back.  The week before I was going to be down in Dallas I was walking out of Ogilvie Transportation Center on my way to the office when a bus passed with an advertisement for Pacific Rim.  I put two and two together and sent my friend who lives there a text with a simple query, “You know what’s happening on July 12th?”  It meant we could go see Pacific Rim when I was in Dallas.

I wasn’t practicing expectation management.  I’d thrown all caution to the wind and decided that Pacific Rim was the greatest thing ever and no matter what happened it would be everything I wanted it to be and more.  I was in a dangerous place.

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In the car on the way back to my hotel my friend started picking the movie apart.  There were all kinds of problems with the film, mostly because there were any number of things that made absolutely no sense.  His biggest problem, though, was that the movie didn’t engage in anything even remotely resembling character development.

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I realized a few years back that the most important story is the one that doesn’t get told.  I was working on a novel and I had a character I loved and who had a crazy-ass backstory that I wanted to tell.  I didn’t tell it.  I described the character and made sure that I gave enough details to explain who he was and why he was in that place and doing the thing he was doing and decided to leave the rest up to whoever happened to read the book.[4]

Not telling the entire story is an act of faith.  It invites a compact with the audience to say, “I’m not going to tell you everything and I’m going to trust that you’ll realize that this character is as awesome as I think they are.”  Too little entertainment today asks the audience to make that compact.  It’s sad, really.

In not telling the entire story the storyteller invited the audience to live in the world.  He or she says, “Come, join me.  There’s a giant universe here filled with stories as yet untold.  Let’s tell those stories together.”

I tried to explain the concept to my friend while we were in the car.  I saw Pacific Rim as a masterpiece of storytelling.  It had a specific story to tell and a collection of characters who needed to drive that story forward.  Those characters arrived fully formed and played out their roles on the screen.  They were a bit cartoonish and stock, yes, but the story itself was cartoonish and stock.

It’s difficult, sometimes, to realize it’s possible for a thing to be both a masterpiece and a cartoonish, stock story.  When you walk in expecting to see a big budget story about humongous mecha punching giant monsters in the face it’s easier, though.  I wasn’t expecting Pacific Rim to approach the enduring cultural level of, say, The Great Gatsby.  I did want to see something that was the ultimate culmination of all of my fantasies about giant robots punching shit in the face.

On that Pacific Rim delivered.  Oh, my god, did Pacific Rim deliver.

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Friday night I was talking to one of my old professors.  The conversation had turned to movies and I’d just launched into my explanation of why Pacific Rim is a brilliant movie.  I was in full-on geek mode and it quickly became obvious that my full-on geekery was amusing the hell out of him.

I should point out that by that time I’d seen Pacific Rim again in glorious IMAX 3D.  I’m not a big fan of 3D movies, but I am a huge fan of IMAX and I knew I had to see Pacific Rim in the big format before it was gone.

I’ll admit that I was worried.  Guillermo del Toro was talking about Pacific Rim 2, but the box office was talking about, well, Grown-Ups 2.  So I went to see Pacific Rim in glorious IMAX 3D as a sort of act of desperation.  It seemed that people didn’t respond to the movie like I had.  Why?  I don’t know.  Maybe no one else cares about humongous mecha punching shit in the face.  Those people are sad, sad people.

They used a rocket elbow.  Did I mention the rocket elbow?  Rocket elbow.  ROCKET.  ELBOW.

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I geeked out about Pacific Rim to my dad.  By that point it wasn’t just the humongous mecha rocket elbowing giant monsters in the face angle.  I’d had my mind blown by the sheer technical beauty of the glorious IMAX 3D presentation.

He was surprised.  He told me that the critics weren’t exactly on board.  I was confused.  I convinced my dad to go to the Sunday matinee showing in glorious IMAX 3D.

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As we walked out of the theater I said, “So…was that not awesome?”

He replied with, “I realized a few minutes in that the trick is to not think about it too much.”

My dad got it in one.

I say this as someone who has now seen Pacific Rim three times.  I’ve devoted way too much brain space to Pacific Rim over the past…however many months it’s been a thing.  I’ve just now written nearly two thousand words on the subject.

I say this as someone who intends to go see Pacific Rim one more time in glorious IMAX 3D.  There are some things that require no thought.  There are some things that require a lot of thought.  There are some things that are best if they’re only thought about in anticipation or in review.

Pacific Rim doesn’t make a goddamn bit of sense.  The entire movie is basically the perfect storm of fridge logic and rule of cool.  But it’s both earnest enough to pull it off and silly enough to let you know that, yes, everyone involved is aware of the absurdity of the entire exercise.  It’s also brilliantly done from a technological perspective.  I avoid 3D like the plague but this movie has single-handedly convinced me to reconsider that stance.  Even in the regular old 2D non-IMAX format the cinematography is brilliant.

The biggest thing, though, is that at no point does the movie screw up the scale.  That’s the hardest bit to pull off in something like this.  The Kaiju and Jaegers are always unfathomably large and never feel like anything remotely human in scale.  That’s the thing that strikes me every time I see the movie.

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Pacific Rim is brilliant.  You should go see it, preferably in glorious IMAX 3D before Friday, when it will be replaced by The Wolverine.

But when you get there do yourself a favor: don’t think about it too much.

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[1]When I say “fanfic” I mean that in the purest sense.  The Goliath Marauders were named after the BattleMechs piloted by the two founders of the unit, who were members of the Gray Death Legion left for dead during the Clan Invasion.  Said founders were also, if I recall, me and my best friend.

[2]I basically took the Goliath Marauders story I’d already created and moved it around.  I think I figured out at a very early age that fanfic isn’t actually a good idea, but that if I made it more generalized I had a winning idea.  So I moved the key elements and made my ragtag band of Clan survivors into a Draconis Combine unit caught by the Smoke Jaguars or Ghost Bears.  It probably wouldn’t have gotten anywhere no matter what happened, though, since I totally missed out on a lot of the development in the larger BattleTech universe and had the unit equipped with stuff that they simply shouldn’t have had at the time.  In my defense I was, like, fourteen.

[3]MechCommander 2 remains one of my all-time favorite games.  A couple years ago I revisited the cartoon universes.  The BattleTech Saturday morning cartoon was awful.  EXO Squad held up surprisingly well.

[4]No one read the book, for the record.

Factoring Christianity

I’ve struggled to put Christianity in its proper place whilst cataloging my various insecurities.  When I left I wanted to just say, “Well, I didn’t like myself and Christianity told me that I sucked, therefore it must be Christianity’s fault.”  That made a great deal of sense.  I’d been a Christian forever and I’d hated myself forever and I’d gotten a constant message that I was lower than a snake’s belly in a wagon rut, so, hey, cause and effect, right?

That explanation never really sat well with me, though.  It was convenient and it looked right, but something about it just didn’t fit.  As I separated myself more and more from Christianity and yet couldn’t get over the sense that I didn’t much like myself it only became more readily apparent that I was missing a pretty big piece of the puzzle by just saying, “It’s Christianity’s fault.”  There was something else going on.

MRAs, of all people, put the last piece in place.

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There’s a weird hive mind amongst the MRA community.  They run around the internet posting on the site of anyone who disagrees with them or fails to match up to their expectations of proper manhood[1] in order to tell them of their failures.  It was instructive, but probably not in the intended way.

One of them showed up at Fred’s place whenever Fred posted anything about his adopted daughters, of whom Fred is quite apparently proud.[2]  The guy would then castigate Fred for not being a real man because he was a mewling, pathetic idiot raising a real man’s children.  In this the “real man” was defined as “capable of impregnating a woman” and “not real man” was defined as, um, not doing that, I guess.  Because everyone knows that only real men can have unprotected vaginal sex with women.  I guess.  It’s a little fuzzy.

See, according to the MRAs the world is split into “alpha males” and “not-alpha males.”  Alpha males are defined by their ability to fuck as many women as possible.  Interestingly enough, too, alpha males are defined by their ability to then not impregnate said women or manage to not pay if they do end up going halfsies on a baby.  If this is your first introduction to the concept you might be thinking, “Wow, so it sounds like ‘real men’ are actually selfish, immature wankers and to be avoided at all costs.”  You’re not wrong.

The funniest thing about Fred’s particular MRA fanboy was the way said individual would show up and tell Fred he wasn’t a real man and then launch into a screed based entirely on quoting some other MRA with a stupid internet handle.  In my various explorations of the world of MRAs I noticed that they spent an awful lot of time quoting other MRAs.  It looked, in fact, as if they were intellectually unsure of themselves and needed reassurance from others in order to assert their superiority.  That looked like nothing so much as the behavior of someone who wasn’t really an alpha male.[3]

Then there was the John Scalzi/Vox Day dustup earlier this year.  Vox Day, the contemptible little pissant that he is, got a bug up his butt about John Scalzi.  I don’t really know why and I don’t really care, but I’d assume it’s because Vox Day is a terrible writer with delusions of grandeur in the world of sci-fi and John Scalzi is a wildly successful writer of sci-fi who is so well respected in the fantasy and sci-fi community that he just finished up a three-term run as the President of the SFWA.  Scalzi is also a definite and unapologetic ally of women and happily married and raising a daughter who appears to be insanely well adjusted and self-assured.

I would contend, then, that Vox Day is jealous of John Scalzi because John Scalzi has something that Vox Day appears to completely lack: happiness.  In this I would say there’s a common thread with Fred Clark’s MRA fanboy.  As such Vox Day ended up enviously looking upon Scalzi’s very public life with the same contempt the Grinch held for all the Whos in Whoville at the beginning of…um…what was that book?  Horton Hears a Who?  Yeah, that one.

He then attempted to steal all of Scalzi’s joy by declaring Scalzi a gamma male and declaring all of Scalzi’s readers rabbits.[4]  The only way he knows to deal with others is to declare his own superiority and then just assume that matters.  Long story short, it doesn’t.  Scalzi turned that into a pledge drive that raised thousands of dollars for organizations that help women over the course of a day or two.

All the while Vox Day and his minions listened to the Whos down in Whoville singing their happy songs and managed to completely avoid letting their hearts grow three sizes.  Because MRAs are idiots.  There’s a moral to this story: don’t be an idiot.

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What does this have to do with me, you ask?  It proved to be the final key I needed to understand my relation to Christianity and how Christianity related to my own set of inferiorities.

It was easy for me to watch the MRAs impotently rage at John Scalzi’s or Fred Clark’s happiness.  I simply do not and never will buy into their conception of what makes a person valuable.  I’m baffled by why anyone would want to spend their time having meaningless sex with strangers.  I’m alternately enraged and amused by their insistence that women aren’t people deserving of full respect.  I’m definitely amused by their insistence on letting everyone know they’re just the tops and they’re true paragons of manly men who can dominate all the womens while they seem to mostly be posturing to each other in ways that make it seem like they should just give up and admit they really want to have sex with each other.

In short it’s easy for me to look at them and say, “You’re full of shit.”  They can pass judgment on me all day and it won’t matter because their criteria for acceptance is so far outside of the scope of what I use to judge myself that it doesn’t matter.  Watching Scalzi and Clark continue along with their happy lives and pissing their fanboys off simply by existing and having no shits to give only made that difference more obvious.

That’s where Christianity comes back into my story.

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Evangelical Christianity is really little more than a minefield of social mores and opportunities to commit massive sins in front of an audience actively looking for something to take you down.  I spent an awful lot of time trying to be outwardly perfect for that audience.  I was good at it, but I usually knew I was only faking my success.  The older I got and the more I became acquainted with the larger world the more I thought the whole system was bullshit.

It was much easier for me to see that with others, though.  I knew people who weren’t Christians (or, in some cases, the right kind of Christians) who seemed to be happy and decent and didn’t really need any of the Jesus stuff I was supposed to be selling.  It also seemed to me that if they became Christians like I was a Christian it would be a net negative for them, as they’d be thrown into the same world I lived in.  In short, I was trying to tell a happily married man that he wouldn’t be successful unless he left his happy home with the wife he loved in order to try to have sex with strangers in bars every night.

What business of mine was it, anyway?  It’s profoundly disrespectful to inject yourself into someone else’s life just to tell them they’re living their life wrong because they’re not matching up to your ideals.  If that other person is healthy, hale, and happy and adding a net benefit to the world you’re doing them and everyone in their life a disservice by trying to get them to change to a different level of expectation and self-evaluation.   If they’re not healthy, hale, and happy but they’re not asking you for help then it’s really none of your goddamn business.  This counts double for Evangelical Christianity, since they offer the diagnosis and try to sell the cure and the diagnosis is always, “You’re not exactly like us,” while the cure is always, “Become exactly like us.”

There was no option to say, “Yeah, thanks, that’s not my bag.”  I internalized the notion that other people got to tell me what I was supposed to be and why.  That meant that anything I did that was outside of expected the norm was something I had to justify, hide, or apologize for.  I never learned that it was okay to say, “Well, hey, you think A and I think B.  That’s cool.”  I learned that I was supposed to think A and that I thought B and therefore I was going to get in trouble.

I can laugh it off now and go on with my life.  It took a long time to learn that lesson.

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[1]Except this site, since I have precisely the internet footprint of a sand flea.

[2]And here I mean apparently not in the sense that he’s faking it but in the sense that it’s readily apparent that he’s proud of his non-biological progeny.

[3]As a historian I’d say there’s nothing wrong with quoting someone else.  Quoting indicates that you’ve done your research and are aware of other people’s arguments for or against a position.  However there’s not a historian alive who would limit him- or herself to endlessly quoting other historians.  At some point you have to stop saying, “Hey, so-and-so said this and so and so is right,” and start saying, “This is the information available and because of this information I believe that [insert argument here] is what happened and why.”  At that point you bring in the words of other historians to say they’d probably support your assertion.  It’s not possible to build a career on just parroting the arguments of others, though.

[4]Or something.  I’m still not entirely sure what the rabbit thing means and I refuse to give enough of a shit to find out.

Alpha Mansion

I briefly fell into that chunk of the population that believes in stratifications for Alpha/Beta/Zeta Males.  It came, not surprisingly, at that moment of transition when I began leaving Christianity but didn’t know where else to go or even if I was going.  It should also come as absolutely not surprise to anyone that Amy was involved.[1]

I was terrified of actually talking to girls when I was growing up.  I was the fat kid.  I was a spaz.  I wasn’t good at sports.  I was a complete and total geek whose particular forms of geekery weren’t cool and probably still aren’t.  I raced R/C cars.  I played collectible card games.  I frickin’ played BattleTech against myself.[2]

All of those things were secondary, really.  All of those things were the excuses I used to explain away my anxieties and fears.  All of those things allowed me to blame somewhat outside forces and avoid admitting that, deep down, I pretty much thought I was a completely worthless human being.  I didn’t like myself at all and I couldn’t imagine why anyone else would, either.

I desperately wanted validation but I didn’t know where to go to find it.  I didn’t know how to ask, either.  I got good at self-deprecation and fishing for compliments.  I couldn’t believe other people when they praised me and I took any insult more than a little too personally, even insults that were obviously not intended as factual statements.  I took everything and balled it all up inside of me into a bundle of self-directed hatred.

Church, as I’ve said, was actually my salvation for a bit.  I was a smart kid and I was desperately looking for a way to be accepted and being good at church seemed like a fairly easy route to acceptance.  All it took was knowing the appropriate way to pray and being able to toss out some Bible verses at appropriate times.  Do that with a certain amount of gravitas and people eventually start saying, “Hey, that guy gets it.”  Attendance is key, too.  If there was a church thing going on I was at that church thing.  People begin to think of you as reliable and valuable.

The problem is that I still couldn’t figure out how to talk to girls.  I was still terrified of them.  Starting in the seventh grade I’d pick some girl to have a thing for and pine over her and decide she was the best thing ever and wax poetic about her qualities while trying to be her friend and desperately trying to avoid letting her know that was how I felt and basically trying the Nice Guy angle.

I wouldn’t have admitted it then, even though I eventually began to suspect it, but I began to resent the girls who never seemed to get around to falling in love with me and giving my life meaning.  It didn’t make Christianity any easier, either.  My conception of the Cosmic Jackass God started here.  I became convinced that since god had some sort of plan for me and it obviously didn’t involve the perfect girl I used as the object of my obsession that I would find out god wanted me with some hideous, disgusting hag.  God was an asshole like that.

I fell back on the easiest excuse to use as a Christian.  I started telling everyone that I thought god had given me the gift of singleness.  Boom, problem solved.  Except for the bit where I didn’t actually want to be single.  But I had to maintain a cheerful demeanor and be totally on board because otherwise I’d lose my status as a true man of god or whatever.  It doesn’t surprise me that I basically had a complete emotional breakdown and nearly blew all my mental gaskets while I was out at Western.

Amy showed up while I was picking up the pieces of my bout with insanity.  I was considering dropping Christianity completely at the time, so it was interesting, to say the least,[3] that I met her right then and there.  She was smart, she was cute, she could hold her own in conversation, and she seemed to think I was pretty damn cool.  All of those things I’d once thought were impossible were suddenly right in front of me.  Everything was completely awesome for, like, a month.  Maybe three.

My doubts, fears, and insecurities crept back in.  It was inevitable, I suppose.  She had her own shit to deal with and when it got right down to it we were pretty bad for each other.  We were too similar in places where we really needed to be different.  We were too stubborn in places where we were different but needed to find common ground.  I honestly don’t think that any of our problems were insurmountable, but there was a definite insurmountable obstacle: neither one of us was particularly emotionally healthy and we took our shit out on each other all the goddamn time.

I remember that during the summer where everything was actually working we had a lot of conversations about social position.  We used the alpha/beta/whatever positioning system and discussed what was up.  Both of us were convinced that we were some variety of alpha[4] and both of us were convinced that the other one was an alpha.  Thinking about that now I see a whole forest of red flags flapping in the breeze.  At the time it seemed like the most perfectly natural and acceptable thing to worry about and/or claim to be.

I didn’t know what Men’s Rights Activists were at the time.  I didn’t know what Pick-Up Artists were, either.  I’d heard the various ideas thrown about and I’m sorry to say that I bought into a few of them.  I was certainly worried about making sure that everyone knew I was an Alpha Male.  I wasn’t sure how to get what I wanted any other way.

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The Pick-Up Artist shtick never appealed to me.  I’m baffled by casual sex and I have no idea why I would want any.  I’ve never had a one-night stand and I don’t plan on changing that at any point.  That means that, at best, I don’t see PUAs as people with whom I have common cause.  When I first learned about them, though, I found what they did extremely distasteful.  I didn’t like it on a level that seemed far too personal for something about which I didn’t care.  It was visceral, though, and even running across PUAs on some web page left me wanting to wash out my soul.

I did a little research and eventually came to the conclusion that I took the PUA thing personally because the PUA thing was directed at me.  On some level that meant that if there were guys out there who were being massive creeps it somehow reflected on me.  That, of course, is more than a little silly.  It’s why my reaction was visceral and hard to pin down.

I’d always thought my problem in the world of dating was that I didn’t know how to talk to women.  It was obvious, too, that I was terrified of opening myself up to get rejected.  I considered myself a failure of some fundamental level because I couldn’t figure out how to get myself a girlfriend.  I’d also always kinda resented the girls in question for not making it any easier on me.

The advice offered by PUAs seemed like a perfect antidote to that sort of thinking.  I can basically boil the entire thing down to its essentials for you.  First: go out and get rejected so goddamn many times by so goddamn many women that you stop giving a shit.  Second: figure out how to make them feel inferior to you and, in doing so, pursue you.  Third: go online and tell other guys about how totally laid you got, dude.  Simple!

On its face this actually seems like valid advice.  At least the first bit does and the second bit is based on a sound psychological principle.  If you’re afraid of something the best way to deal is to confront your fears, after all.  People value things they have to work for more than things they’re just given.  The biggest problem that comes from being a Nice Guy is never actually trying to get what you want and playing the role of doormat to the object of your affection.  It’s a vicious cycle.

The problem, then, is one of philosophy.  The PUA advice seems to boil down to, “Be a giant asshole and, in doing so, get laid.”  That’s the first mark against it.  The advice also answers the wrong question.  If your goal is to have a meaningful relationship then having lots and lots of casual sex with people you treat like shit doesn’t seem to actually be a step in the right direction.  It’s like asking for directions to the McDonald’s and receiving the operator’s manual to a 1984 Trans Am.

The biggest problem with the PUA thing is at its very core, though.  If you dig any distance below the surface there’s a strong culture of treating women like shit.  Prominent PUAs – and here I always use Vox Day, since I don’t bother to keep track of too many prominent PUAs – obviously hate women.  They make no secret of their hatred of women and they make no secret of their belief that women exist so men can fuck them and try to avoid having to give them money because if they get their claws into you, man…it’s over.  They get pregnant and then they get fat and your life is over.

I think that my reaction of visceral disgust when I was introduced to the world of the Pick-Up Artists came from this underlying philosophy.  That disgust, in turn, was fueled, at least in part, by fear and recognition.  I recognized an ugly part of myself in the guys who fell for the PUA thinking and I feared becoming one.  I, after all, had always been afraid of talking to women.  I always wanted women to give me value.  And I resented them for not doing so.

I could see that same resentment in the words and thoughts of the Pick-Up Artists.  Had things taken a different turn I could have become a PUA.  I really, really didn’t want to confront that inner darkness.

----------------

[1]This is actually one of those things that really bugs me.  It’s now been more than five years since we’ve talked.  I’ve pretty much made it a point, at least for the last couple of those years, to stop talking and thinking about her.  As such I don’t like bringing her up and I don’t like opening myself to the armchair psychoanalysis that comes from such things.

It’s also not really about her anymore.  Amy doesn’t really exist and hasn’t existed as a real or even somewhat real part of my life for a long, long time.  That stretch of my life was a hinge on which an awful lot of stuff swung and I never properly dealt with most of the fallout.  So on some level I need to bring Amy up in order to move on.  But it’s not actually Amy.  It’s a pale shadow of an idea of a person I once held in my mind.

[2]Who does that?  Really?  Name one other person.

[3]From the perspective of a guy who’d just about lost his damn mind and was trying to decide if god was a thing.  From the perspective of not that guy it’s pretty meh, really.

[4]Now, you might be looking at that bit in relation to my admission above that I’d pretty much been a gigantic fucking ball of self-hatred and insecurities since the seventh grade and wonder where the hell I got off claiming to be some sort of superior human.  That juxtaposition should make you go, “Hmm.”  It should make you go, “Hmm,” quite loudly.

On People

I consider myself a feminist.  I don’t necessarily call myself one, since I’m not sure if that’s appropriate.  Still, I’d say I’m definitely an ally.

I came to my feminism through a strange path: Judaism.

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This is a testimony.  It’s my story of awakening.

I went to Western Illinois University with the intent of getting a degree so I could go on to Seminary and become a pastor.  I took history as my major because I love history.  I took education as my co-major because I wanted a marketable skill to fall back on.  Then I realized I didn’t want to be a teacher.  That meant I needed a minor.  I chose religious studies because, well, duh.

I admit I was a little naïve.  I thought about religious studies from the perspective of my Evangelical upbringing, when all education was built around reinforcing the students’ view of the Bible as central, infallible, and the only document that truly mattered.  I wasn’t fully prepared for what I was about to learn as a history major with a religious studies minor.

I took a course on Judaism.  One of the assigned books was about Jewish feminism and written by a female rabbi.  It was the first time in my life I’d been forced to grapple with feminism on a personal level and as presented by someone who wasn’t offering a strawman interpretation of feminism.

I came away from that experience with a simple maxim: Women are people, too.

At the time I wasn’t even remotely conversant in or even aware of the common coin of what I think of as internet feminism.  I wouldn’t confront ideas like rape culture or privilege for a few years.  I’ll also admit that when I first confronted those terms I didn’t react in the best way possible.  Still, I think my first experience grappling with feminism and my simple maxim helped me to adjust and understand.

I’d like to say that I figured everything out at that moment.  I can’t, though.  I realize now that my conception of women at the time was a combination of salvation and resentment.  I expected a woman to come along and save me.  I resented women because none of them seemed willing to do so.

That’s why I spent so much time attached to the idea of Amy.  In my mind she was someone who could have made it all better.  I expected to find in her some sort of synthesis of the religion I wanted to find and the abolishment of the religion I hated.  I expected to find in her the forgiveness I couldn’t offer myself.  I expected to find in her the meaning I couldn’t find in anything else I’d explored.

Amy was people, too.  Amy was a person.  She had her own shit to deal with.  She had her own journey to take.  She had her own failures to fear and successes to cheer.  I couldn’t let her be people, though.  Even after we stopped talking I couldn’t let that happen.  Even after I left religion I couldn’t let that happen.  I needed her to be something bigger, something greater.  I needed her to be something lesser, something worse.

It’s why now, all these years later, I don’t know what I’d say to her if I suddenly found myself looking her in the eyes.  It’s why I alternate between, “I hate you,” and “I’m sorry.”

The truth is that she hurt me.

The truth is that I hurt her.

The truth is that I hate her for hurting me like she did.  The truth is that I hate me for hurting her like I did.

This is where the double standard comes into play.  I can deal with what I did because I’m a person and I know that I fail.  I can’t deal with what she did because she was supposed to be better.

Women are people, too.  Amy was people.  I hated her because she was supposed to be better than people.

So I suppose that if I were to find myself looking into her eyes right now I’d have to say, “I’m sorry.”

-------------------

That’s the thing about drawing the line at “Women are people, too.”  It’s easy, I suppose, for me to dismiss the assholes who think women are just pieces of meat to be ogled and hit on.  It’s a lot harder for me to realize that my former default assumption that women are god-like beings who can offer absolution was just as wrong.

Maybe I flatter myself.  Maybe I’m not as much of a feminist as I thought.  Maybe that’s why I hesitate to apply the label.  I know that somewhere deep down, or not so deep down, I still think women should be better and I know that I shouldn’t think that.

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I’d started writing this post as an excuse to tell a story that illustrated how enlightened I am.  I, um, I don’t feel I can do that with good conscience anymore.  So that’s awkward.

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One of the types of men who annoy me the most are the ones who just want a cookie.  They’re the ones who say that they’re feminist allies, but who could never say they’re actually feminists because of those feminists who give all feminists a bad name.  They then dredge up the worst straw feminists the internet has to offer as the type of woman who give feminism a bad name.  That isn’t being an ally.  That’s being an asshole who wants a cookie.[1]

There’s a pattern I see in both the cookie-wanting “allies” and the anti-feminists who want to be seen as friends to women who say they really know what women need.  They pick a particular woman or group of women.  Generally that woman is their wife or their mother or their sister.  If it’s a group it’s probably women they know at church.  They then say, “I love all women, but I can’t be a feminist because not all women are like [insert exemplar here].”

That’s where “women are people, too” comes back into play.

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It’s easy to see how bad it is to see women as meat and treat them as such.  Act like women shouldn’t be allowed to vote, hold down jobs, or make decisions and it’s pretty obvious you don’t think of them as people.  Act like women only exist to service men sexually and that service can be forcibly rendered at any time and in any way and it’s pretty obvious you don’t think of them as people.  The opposite view is somewhat harder to see and interpret, however.

If you act like women are supposed to be better than men in all ways it’s easy to disguise that as a good thing.  Positive stereotyping is easy to pass off as praise, after all.[3]  Saying that all women are better than men is just as bad.[4]

-------------------

So, I guess to try to bring this full circle, the lesson is that it’s best to remember that people are people.  Applying a label to yourself doesn’t make you better than anyone else any more than applying a label to someone else makes them worse.

Meanwhile, I don’t think that this means you can’t disagree with or even dislike someone.  You just need to find something beyond the most convenient label.  Like, “I can’t stand Janet because she ran over my dog with her car and didn’t apologize,” is a bit more sensible than, “I can’t stand Janet because she’s a woman.”  One of those is based on a defensible position.

Similarly, if you’re out in the realm of ideas you don’t have to agree with everything another person says.  I think this is the hardest thing for the internet to figure out.  For instance, I read Amanda Marcotte and I largely agree with her conclusions about stuff.  I don’t agree with everything she says or every conclusion she draws, but when I read what she says and I disagree it’s because I’ve read her words in good faith and decided that she took something the wrong way or made a leap from Point A directly to Point D or lacked/ignored a key bit of information or whatever.  Whenever she writes something, though, someone shows up in the comments section to tell her she’s wrong about everything and that she’s wrong because she’s a woman/feminist/both.  That’s fucking stupid.

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So…yeah.  I should probably cut this short.  I guess my point is this: it’s equally important for men to acknowledge that women will fuck up sometimes as it is to acknowledge that they will succeed.  It’s more obvious to see the disservice done when we say that they’re just meat but saying they’re ascended beings who will magically make everything better doesn’t help even a tiny little bit.

Or, to put it another way: Women are people, too.

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[1]I have a confession to make at this juncture.  I fear Bruce Gerencser’s most recent abrupt departure from the internet was my doing, precisely because of this.  He’d put up some post about how he was an ally to women because he loved and respected his wife but couldn’t call himself a feminist because there were women out there who went out in short skirts and got drunk and then cried “feminism!” whenever men dared hit on them.

I called bullshit in the comment thread and asked him to stop perpetuating such things, since that’s the core of victim blaming that victims of rape receive.  That, in turn, degenerated into a series of posts in which Bruce dug himself deeper into a hole, up to and including the old “if you get into a car accident the police will assign culpability and rape is exactly like a car accident” dodge.

Now, I’ve got nothing whatsoever against Bruce.  But he’s been married longer than I’ve been alive and before getting married he was hanging out in a more conservative Evangelical subculture than I ever knew.  I feel like I’m more of a subject matter expert than he is when it comes to hanging out in establishments that serve alcohol and observing the mating habits of humans.[2]  So I tried to convince him to back off and retract what he was saying, since he was showing his ass in public in a way that’s truly potentially harmful, especially coming from someone who has a fairly loud voice in a community I call home.  It got pretty contentious, I’ll admit.

A couple hours later I went to check and see what had happened and his website was down.  I suppose it’s possible that was a coincidence, but…well…

[2]Actually, one of the most interesting things I ever, um, eavesdropped on, I guess, was between a gay man and his female friend on the L.  He was telling her about some guy he’d met at a club who kept hitting on him and made him uncomfortable and then followed him after he left that club and went to some other place.  When he was telling the story it was obvious he was freaked out by the whole thing.

That’s one of those moments of enlightenment.  Harassment, assault, and rape and the accompanying fear of said activities by victims or potential victims truly isn’t an issue of short skirts and drunkenness and those damn bitches who want to be out drunk and in short skirts.  It’s an issue of predators looking for prey and people who don’t take no for an answer.

[3]To offer a different example, there’s the stereotype that all Asians are good at math.  This sounds like a praise, at least coming from a white person, because it’s saying, “Hey, aren’t you good at this one thing,” instead of saying, “Hey, y’all are subhuman and we’re going to take all of your stuff.”

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re an Asian person.  First, you probably don’t think of yourself as “Asian,” but rather “Chinese” or “Japanese” or even, gasp, “American,” since you were born in fucking Munster, Indiana and you’re a third generation American who’s never been outside of the continental United States and your grandmother’s Australian.  That’s even assuming you think of yourself in those terms (I, for instance, am Scandinavian but the child of many generations of Americans.  I’d put those tags somewhere below “Doctor Who fan” on my list of self-identifiers), but that’s a whole different rant.  Imagine your name is Joe and your ancestors came from, say, Japan.  Imagine, further, that you absolutely suck at math.  You have to pull out a calculator to figure out what happens if you subtract 2 from 3.

Anyway, back to the point.  You’ve spent your entire life hearing, “Asians are good at math.”  You suck at math in ways that can’t even be quantified by science (or math).  How good does that “positive” stereotype make you feel when it gets passed around?

[4]NK Jemisin has written some of my favorite fiction books of late.  In The Shadowed Sun there’s a bit where two characters are talking about the treatment of women in the civilization that’s the focus of the Dreamblood books.  One of the characters says that women are treated as goddesses and, as such, it’s impossible to say they’re repressed.  The other character retorts that the depiction of women as goddesses seems to be the excuse for repression.  It’s a really well done bit that illustrates the problem precisely.

Basically, I’m offering some book suggestions here.  Give her money.

Also, oh my god, looking for links to NK Jemisin’s books brought me to this link about something Vox Day said about her.  Vox Day is a shitstain on the underwear of humanity.  Like, I don’t know how anyone can wake up and be as offensive to as many people as he is without spontaneously combusting.  I was prepared for just about anything since I’ve seen his MRA bullshit on full display, but…wow.  Just…wow.

NK Jemisin’s response was classy and…well, civilized.  And it degenerated into the sort of argument the internet is supposed to facilitate.
This is the text of the speech that set off Vox Day’s subhuman diatribe.

On Being a Geek

A few of you might have noticed that I’ve been absent for a few months.  I could offer the standard excuse and say that I’ve been busy.  That’s true enough, as I’ve been quite busy these past few months.  Really, I’ve been quite busy for the last year.  Busyness isn’t the story behind my absence.  It’s not even the primary excuse.

I think writing requires three main components: time, energy, and desire.  If you have two of those components you can usually manufacture the third.  If you’re a writer you usually have two of those components at all times, especially since it’s the third that’s most important and the thing that drives those of us who call ourselves writers the hardest.

I haven’t had any desire to write of late.  It’s really that simple.  I’ve thought about writing many times over the last couple of months but as soon as I’ve thought about it I’ve discarded the thought in favor of doing something else.  What writing I’ve done has been the bare minimum necessary to communicate specific information about a specific thing.

I’ve enjoyed my hiatus from writing.  I long thought that since I considered myself a writer that meant that if I didn’t write about something then it wasn’t a valid experience somehow.  Since Christmas I’ve been re-evaluating pretty much everything about my self-image and how I interact with other people and see myself interacting with others.  In the past I’ve gone jackrabbiting off to my laptop in the middle of those things in order to write about them and try to make sure I understood and properly processed them in an appropriately writerly sort of way.  This time?  Not so much.  I haven’t written a damn thing about what’s gone on in my skull for quite some time.

It’s hard to say if not writing was a decision I made or the end result of a sort of weariness about the idea of writing.  Whatever the answer, though, it was the right one.  For the first time in a long time (possibly ever) I ended up making decisions without feeling that I had to explain them.  For the first time I honestly assessed myself without feeling like I would need to justify my assessments to anyone.

One of the things I realized is that I’ve been playing to an audience my entire life.  Or, if not my entire life, at least as far back as I can remember.  I tend to push that off as an artifact of my time in Evangelical Christianity, where there was a definite pressure to conform and to at least seem like I wasn’t doing all of those things that weren’t deemed acceptable.  I tended to talk about shame and being afraid to reveal my true self in terms that were decidedly evangelical.  I could never quite shake the feeling that I wasn’t getting out the entire story there due to the simple realization that I left Christianity years ago but I was still afraid of what would happen if people found out certain things about me.  I hid, I equivocated, I evaded, I outright lied.

I haven’t been lying for the last several months.  I think the core reason I haven’t been lying is because I haven’t been writing.  That means I’ve been avoiding that built in audience I’m always otherwise attempting to appease.  It’s been pretty fantastic, I tell you what.

----------------

It’s funny, though, since that audience is sometimes necessary.  When we last convened I was writing up a series of posts about digging out my old R/C cars and BattleTech stuff.  One of my friends then asked me if I wanted to go to the Dragon’s Maze prerelease.  I said, “Sure, why not?”[1]  Mostly.  We’ll pretend it was that simple, since I don’t really remember.

This means we need to talk about Magic: The Gathering for a bit.

I first started playing some time in junior high.  I’m guessing it was in 1994, since I remember buying a lot of Fallen Empires and Revised and I remember when Ice Age came out and Chronicles was announced.  I also know that I quit fairly shortly thereafter.  I’d gotten it into my head that Satan was behind the game, so I traded my cards for a start at the Star Wars CCG.[1]

I got back in during Invasion and played through Odyssey and Onslaught and into Mirrodin.  I also have a bunch of Kamigawa cards for some reason and I went to the Lorwyn prerelease.  That Invasion-Odyssey-Onslaught stretch was the first time I played at sanctioned tournaments and holy crap did it suck.  There were people with no social skills and even fewer hygiene skills hanging out in big rooms talking about Magic, Magic, and more Magic.  I’d go to some event or other, play, and then quit for a month or two.  I’d also avoid telling anyone who knew me that I played Magic, since I didn’t want to be associated with the unhygienic ones.

So I quit.  I think I also quit because holy shit Magic wasn’t fun during that stretch.  Also, too, I guess I played into Kamigawa block, but that was also when I went out to Western, so I might have just had other things to do.  I don’t remember, honestly.[2]

I sold some of my cards when I quit.  I kept some others, mostly the ones that weren’t worth much or the ones I needed to build decks I liked.[3]  I then basically resolved to never tell anyone that I’d played Magic.

There used to be a social stigma to being a geek.  I was terrified of being picked on and mocked and, as such, I did my damndest to be at least acceptable.  It was doubly complicated for me, since I was trying to navigate school and church, where the definitions of acceptable were wildly different and the costs of being considered different were similarly divergent.

I realize now that I was playing to audiences then.  The problem is that I was playing to the wrong audiences.  There’s no reason to worry about people who are going to mock you for being you and liking the things you like, especially if those people might only be doing it in your own mind.  I’ve only figured that out within the last six months or so.

So when my friend saw I was writing about R/C cars and BattleTech he decided that he could ask if I wanted to go play Magic.  I said sure.  I had fun.  I was totally okay with that.  I then spent a disturbing amount of money on small pieces of cardboard.

It’s a drug.  A drug, I tells ya.

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I bought a new R/C truck a couple months back.  It’s an RC10T4.2 Team Edition, in case anyone cares.  I painted the body the closest color I could find to TARDIS blue and put a Doctor Who sticker on the hood.  I’d been planning on doing something more expansive, so I ended up with a bunch of Doctor Who stickers.  I put a Dalek on my deck box since, y’know, it was a thing that looked like it could use a sticker.

I’ve had a bunch of Doctor Who-related conversations since then because of my stickers.

What I’ve realized is this: being a geek is just kind of a thing.  I realized a long time ago that geekery is relative and that people who are totally into sports are geeks in the same way as people who play D&D.  It’s just that when I was a kid it was acceptable to know Pete Rose’s career batting average and not acceptable to spend your weekend rolling D20s in a basement somewhere.  Now you just need to find people who like the one and not the other and you’re fine.  You might also find out that that guy who knows Pete Rose’s batting average and how many points Magic Johnson scored over his career also loves Star Trek.

It seems that some people think this is bad.  I’ve run into a few people who think that because geekery carried social stigma when they were young it means that it should still carry a social stigma.  Otherwise today’s geeks won’t be as dedicated and strong or something.  And then the fake geek girls will show up and ruin all the fun.[4]

I think it’s good.  It means that someone can be an anime geek and someone else can be an RPG geek and someone else can be a video game geek and if it turns out that they all like Doctor Who then they all have something in common.  It also means that if someone who isn’t traditionally considered a geek happens to enjoy Doctor Who then they, too, can find enjoyment and common cause in that.

Mostly, though, it means that we’re not alone.  That, I think was the biggest fear I had.  I played to the audience at hand because I didn’t want to discover that I was alone.

In the end, though, I put myself in a position where I was almost always alone.

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As such I feel like synthesizing where I’ve been.  Writing is an itch that I haven’t scratched in a while, so I want to put some thoughts out.  Then I want to seriously considering get back to writing about history and occasionally posting Letters to Cleo videos.

Consider this the intro to a week of testimony.

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[1]I still have my first release Darth Vader, Obi-Wan, and Luke Skywalker.  They’re worth significantly less than a few Magic cards I own.

[2]I suppose I couldn’t have been completely ashamed of the whole Magic thing.  I went to the Lorwyn prerelease with a couple friends and I remember briefly attempting to teach Amy how to play.  So I guess there’s that.

Also, too, I considered getting back in ‘round about 2009.  One of my teachers from juco owns a card shop in the southwestern suburbs of Chicago and he and his wife are literally two of the finest people I’ve ever known.  A couple of my friends and I used to play there on Friday nights and I almost got back in just to reignite that relationship.  So when my friend asked if I wanted to go to the Dragon’s Maze prerelease his trump card was to tell me that we could go there.

I, um, I’m loyal to a fault.

[3]I kept four decks together: a really good Extended Machinehead deck, a fantastic Extended Sligh deck, a Necropotence deck, and a goofy little red-blue deck I called Monkey with a Taser.  When I pulled my cards back out I could also find and easily identify the remains of a white-blue Stasis deck (sadly, that deck had 4 Tundras, which were worth $10 or so when I sold them.  They’re worth $120 now), a red-black land destruction deck, and a mono green elf deck (that deck had my Gaea’s Cradle, which I was shocked to discover is worth $160, so I’ve got that goin’ for me).

Also, funny story, I discovered that there was a new, fixed format called “Modern.”  So I figured that I might be able to build something for that, only to discover that most of my cards were too old.  So I guess I played in pre-Modern times.

[4]I’ve really, really been wanting to write a post on the fake geek girl thing.  Here’s the abstract of my thoughts: STFU.  No, seriously, STFU.  Women are allowed to be geeks, too.  And, in general, if you think the worst of an entire gender then they’re probably not the problem.  You are.

Selah

This week, man.  This fucking week.

A couple asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of Boston by leaving bombs in public and then running off.

A few dozen asshole cowards bravely stood up to the people of America by keeping us from even allowing a weak-tea plan to move the gun conversation in America.

That's what they all are.  Assholes and cowards.  Mitch McConnell and Heidi Heitkamp are going to have the blood of the next eight year old that gets shot by a madman on their hands just as surely as the asshole cowards who planted a bomb in Boston have the blood of Martin Richard on their hands.

It's a different type of cowardice.  It's a different type of assholeishness.  But it's cowardly and it's assholery all the same.

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In news that didn't get much traction because it was overshadowed: America unequivocally engaged in torture.  There are those of us who knew it.  There are those who did their best to deny it.  But it's out there, now.  America gave up what little moral superiority it had.

And in exchange for our souls we didn't even get actionable information.  Of course, those of us who don't get our information about torture from 24 saw that coming.

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Texas, meanwhile, blew up.

Chicago drowned.

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All I can do is offer the words of Charlie Pierce.  How he managed to get through this week with such grace and poignancy I'll never know.

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And if not that, perhaps this will help.



May next week be better.

You Can Go Home Again, Part 2

Imagine that you’ve been living under a rock for the past decade or so.  I don’t know why you’ve been living under that rock.  Perhaps you’ve spent too long in Arizona and it’s just so nice and cool.  Whatever.

Now imagine that you’ve crawled out from under your rock and decided to rejoin society.  The first thing you do is look at your Nokia candy bar phone with its monochromatic display and ability to let you play Snake and think, “I probably need a new phone.  Especially since the battery in this thing died about nine years, eleven months, and twenty-nine days ago.”

You notice that there’s an AT&T store nearby.  So you walk in and ask, “Hey, do you guys know where there’s a Cingular store around here?  I need a new phone.”

The guy behind the counter asks, “Cingular?  Have you been living under a rock?”  You tell him that yes, yes you have.  So he says that AT&T bought Cingular about nine years ago and that he can totally get you a new phone.

You ask, “So what has changed about cell phones in the last ten years?”

He starts to explain.  About thirty seconds later your head explodes like that dude from Scanners.

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I have this weird tendency to believe that things don’t change at all if I’m not paying attention.  I think that’s probably a pretty normal human tendency, but I find it odd since I notice it in myself and I tend to pay attention to things like that.  So a week or so ago I walked into Al’s Hobby Shop in downtown Elmhurst, Illinois and asked the guy at the counter what’s been going on in the world of R/C cars since 2000.  I didn’t understand something in the neighborhood of 50% of what I was told.  I also got into the habit of starting my sentences with, “In my day…”

I’m an old geezer in training, is what I am.  I’ve been looking forward to my twilight years since I was 25.

If you think about it it’s probably reasonable to think that a lot of things have changed in the world of R/C cars since I hung up my Futaba Magnum Sport back in 2000.  The world of consumer electronics has changed drastically, after all.  It’s also changed in ways that directly impact the R/C world.  We’ve been making better batteries.  We’ve been making electronics smaller, smarter, and lighter.  We’ve been creating new ways of making our devices communicate with each other.

I have a cell phone that can connect to the internet, hook in to my wi-fi network, access files from my laptop, and allow me to talk to my grandmother over my Mazda’s sound system right now.  Absolutely none of that functionality required me to do anything, either.  It was just part of the package.

The good news is that I’m pretty quick on the uptake, so I started to figure out the changes pretty fast.  The bad news is that 13 years is a long time to not pay attention to a thing.  It didn’t take me very long at all to realize that all of my equipment was completely and totally out of date.  That actually kind of made me sad, since my equipment was in really good shape.  The old 410-M5 and 610-RV were still working perfectly.  My old race batteries were still discharging at about the 5 minute, 30 second mark.[1]

I took the RS4-MT and the RS4 out to my cul-du-sac and ran a few batteries through them on Easter Sunday.  Everything worked great except for the bit where the receiver in the RS4 was glitching out and I drove it into a rock while attempting a close cut on a drift maneuver.  The slide broke both rear body posts.[2]  Everything else was fine, but it’s kind of hard to drive a car when the body is hanging off to the side.  This handicap was exacerbated by the fact that one of my front posts was held together by strapping tape.

My battery training instincts were so strong that I pulled the battery out of my RS4 as soon as I realized I wasn’t going to be running it for a while, put the battery into my RS4-MT, and ran out the rest of its charge.  Old habits die hard, I suppose.

It turned out that none of that mattered.  My 410-M5 and 610-RV were no longer relevant.  My Reedy 17 turn and Onyx 14 turn double motors were slow.  My Ni-Cads were race-ready but no longer race worthy.  Even my Futaba Sport radios were more than a little behind the times.  My two newest cars had been discontinued for at least a decade, too.[3]

In truth some of my equipment was out of date when I retired from racing.  The two ESCs were already several years out of date.  Several of my batteries were already pretty old, too, and had been relegated to “practice pack” status.  It didn’t really matter, though, as the state of the art in the world of R/C cars didn’t really advance all that much between 1992 and 2000.  So when I pulled my stuff out of the basement on Easter Sunday I expected to find out that it was old.  The thing that surprised me was when I found out that it had been completely eclipsed by subsequent developments.

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Imagine that you were a total gearhead in the ‘70s and ‘80s.  You were a Chevy person and totally invested in the war with Ford.  But then, for whatever reason, you put your love of cars away for a couple decades and started taking the subway everywhere.  Then one day in early 2013 you decided to renew your license and get your old Impala up and running again, fully expecting to wow all the kids at the local track.

So you do exactly that.  Except what you find is that the kids are now kicking your ass with their Subaru WRX STis and Honda Civic Sis and only the old timers seem to care about Mustangs, Corvettes, and making fun of Mopar.

That’s pretty much where I found myself the Wednesday after Easter.  Ni-Cad batteries were actually two generations behind.  NiMH batteries had come and gone and the new power was coming from LiPos.  Brushless motors had replaced the old brushed cans.  The difference boiled down to more power delivered more quickly with significantly longer run times.  It also meant that there were new players in the market.  Novak and Tekin were still making speed controls, but there was a new kid by the name of Castle Creations.  There were several new manufacturers of batteries I’d never heard of, too.

The biggest change, though, was both the easiest to understand and the hardest to digest.  Traxxas is now the biggest player in the car market.  I knew a couple guys who ran Traxxas cars back in the day.  They weren’t good cars by any stretch of the imagination.  Traxxas was what you got if you couldn’t afford or didn’t know to buy Associated or Losi kits.  Now, though, Traxxas is everywhere.

There’s a very good reason why Traxxas is now the top dog: innovation.  It’s not necessarily that they’ve been innovating on a technological level, although there’s some of that.  I’m told that they single-handedly invented an entire off-road class.  They also brought waterproof electric cars to the market.  Mostly, though, they did what no one was doing in the ‘90s: they figured out that the best way to grow is to cater to the casual R/C driver who just wants to buy a fast car and have it work out of the box.  They also figured out that allowing that casual dabbler to trade in some of the equipment for better equipment later is a pretty good way to keep them coming back for more.

That set of innovations actually made me pretty sad.  Almost everything I saw was a ready to run car in a box.  Aside from my Kyosho Raider I built my cars.  If I got one that was already built it was because I got it used from someone else.  That was a major part of the experience.  I still know almost every inch of my RS4 and RS4-MT because I put everything on those cars together.  I took pride in being able to say that.  They weren’t just R/C cars.  They were my R/C cars.  That’s part of the reason why they followed me to Texas and back and I was able to pull them out after 13 years and run them down my street as if I’d never put them away.

It’s now possible to buy cars that go 70 or even 100 MPH right out of the box.  I suppose that’s fantastic from a marketing perspective.  I suppose it’s snobbish and elitist to complain about how the kids these days just don’t understand.

I also know that while I was at the hobby shop I saw several people walk in and ask to have someone else fix stuff that was so basic I would have been embarrassed to ask about in public.  There’s nothing wrong with asking for help, don’t get me wrong.  There is something wrong with not even bothering to try to figure out why something isn’t working.  It seemed to me that the hobby was headed in that direction, at least judging by what I was seeing.

I can’t fathom letting other people do my work like that.  Since I pulled my old stuff out less than two weeks ago I switched out the plugs on six batteries and four ESCs.[4]  I installed new motors and electronics on two trucks.  I rebuilt the shocks and put new wheels and tires on my RS4-MT.  It’s pretty badass.




I honestly can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t want the pleasure and satisfaction of looking at their car and saying, “I made that.  I fixed that.  It’s mine.”  It seemed I was the only one.  I was starting to despair, too.

Then the good news arrived.

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[1]We ran Ni-Cad batteries back in the day and had to “train” them.  Races lasted five minutes, so the ideal run time was just a bit over five minutes.  We would run the batteries for just over five minutes and then hook them up to discharge lights, which we made ourselves by soldering six to ten automotive bulbs together in series.

It was easy to tell who had the system down.  We’d put the batteries in our cars, then put the transponders in and put the body on.  Then we’d wave the car across the finish line to check in for the race and walk over to the start line and wait until the last possible moment to turn the car on and run over to the drivers’ stand.

My final set of race batteries was a triple set of Trinity 1700 Ni-Cads running Panasonic cells.    They were expensive batteries when I got them at the tail-end of the ‘90s.  I took damn good care of them, including making sure I stored them properly even when I stopped racing for over a decade.  It’s a testament to the quality of the batteries and my understanding of how to take care of them that they still worked exactly as they were supposed to in March of 2013.

[2]I found a new set of RS4 Pro 2 body posts on Amazon and ordered them.  When they came the comparative quality of the Pro 2 posts compared to the RS4 Sport posts was blatantly obvious.  So part of the problem was HPI’s fault.  I’m pretty sure that the Pro 2 posts wouldn’t have broken if I’d done the same exact thing with them installed.

[3]Interestingly enough, though, everyone who’s seen my RS4-MT and knew what it was had the exact same reaction: “Oh, I used to have one of those.  It was a great car.”

Yes.  Yes it was.  Yes it is.

[4]I also discovered that there’s a really good reason why I was never particularly good at soldering: I had a soldering iron that was way too good.

I wanted a good, quality soldering iron with a pistol grip and a trigger.  So I got the best one I could get, a beast of a Weller iron that did 200 watts.  I always used great gobs of solder because the solder seemed to evaporate off the tip of my iron and never seemed to stick properly.  The tip was also a really wide chisel design.  I finally got frustrated by this last weekend and headed to the hardware store to see if I could find a soldering iron with a narrower tip.

I noticed that soldering irons actually had numbers attached to them.  The soldering irons that were listed as “standard grade” were 25 watt units capable of up to 750 degree heat.  The “medium grade units had a few more watts and went up to 900 degrees.  I don’t know how hot my soldering iron got, but, again, 200 watts.  Rosin core solder, by the by, has a melting temperature of about 460 degrees, depending.

Part of the problem is that I was using the 200w gun wrong.  You’re not supposed to hold the trigger down and deliver constant heat.  It has so much power because you’re supposed to pull the trigger, heat it up all quick-like, then hit your spot and release the trigger.  I was applying constant heat, which is stupid as fuck.

Part of the problem, though, is that my tip was way wider than the area I was working with more often than not.  That made precision deployment rather difficult.  Long story short, I got a cheap, small soldering iron that’s way better for my style and application and it’s amazing how much better I got at soldering.

You Can Go Home Again, Part 1

Easter brought about a resurrection…of sorts.  Can you really bring something back to life if it was never alive to begin with?  Or is everything alive if it’s part of your living memory?

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They’ve been important enough that they moved with me four times.  They were dead weight in all of those moves, things I thought I might do something with but never really in any serious, intentional way.  Still, it was a part of my past that I had put away but never really forgotten.  Sentimentality demanded I put in the effort.  So they went to Brookfield.  They went to Texas.  They went into a storage locker for a year in Carol Stream.  Finally they went to my basement.

On Easter Sunday they emerged once again.

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It all started in either the summer of ’92 or ’93.  I want to say it was the summer before seventh grade, which would make it the earlier, but it might have been the summer after.  My junior high offered summer clubs.  It wasn’t summer school so much as summer camp in a school.  I signed up for the radio controlled car club.

One of the requirements was to bring your own radio controlled car.  My dad and I went down to the local Radio Shack and purchased a buggy.  I thought it was the fastest car in the world and it was going to kick everyone’s butt.  I had no idea what I was getting in to.

My little Radio Shack car broke on pretty much the first day.  It was no big loss, really, since my little Radio Shack car was absolutely nothing compared to the cars the rest of the kids were running.  It wasn’t something that could be repaired, either.  My dad and I didn’t go back to the Radio Shack.  We were directed to a local hardware store that had a hobby section.[1]

That was where I bought my first real R/C car: a Kyosho Raider.




The Raider was what was known as an ARR kit, which stood for “almost ready to run.”  It was a starter car that came with a closed, can-style stock motor and a mechanical speed control.  I needed to supply my own radio.  I also needed to paint the body.

For those who don’t know, R/C car bodies are made of clear lexan.  That’s so you can paint the inside.  I did not know that, so I painted the outside.  With a paint brush.  The results were somewhat less than stellar.

The mechanical speed control melted shortly into the summer’s events.  Back to the hobby shop I went with my dad.  I bought my first electronic speed control (ESC): a Novak 410-M5.  It was bright orange with a big, black heat sink.  It also didn’t have a reverse option.  I thought that was weird.  The next time I bought an ESC I got a Novak 610-RV, precisely because it had reverse.

My Kyosho Raider was big, heavy, and slow.  It was also not really part of the zeitgeist, as most of the other kids had Losi or Associated cars.  Losi v. Associated was the Chevy v. Ford of R/C.

They came together at various points over that summer for spirited games of “kill the Raider.”  Weirdly, although I firmly remember being a bullied kid and I remember the chants of, “Kill the Raider!” quite well I don’t remember that as being anything other than good fun.  It was also a useful impetus to become a good driver.  Sometimes slow and steady does win the race.  Other times it simply means you can turn the tables on the other guys.

I also know that I didn’t hold those games of kill the Raider against the other guys.  I raced with them for the better part of the next decade, after all.  I can still remember their names, their faces, and in some cases their cars.

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I didn’t race the Raider for long.  It just wasn’t a good car and there were no modifications that could change that.  I’d added the 410-M5.  I also added a Trinity Slot Machine 27 turn stock motor.[2]  I shifted fairly quickly to 1/10th scale onroad pan cars.  The big dog in that particular class was the Associated RC10L.  I had a (used) TRC Pro10.[3]

Really, though, in 1/10th scale pan car there was no real advantage in one car over another.  This is a Pro10:




This is a RC10L:




The cars were as basic as could be.  It might look like the big metal bar on the front of the Pro 10 would add a lot of weight, but it was some sort of super light magnesium or something and the benefits of a much sturdier and easier to adjust steering system far outweighed the minor weight difference.

I put that car through a lot of races.  The first body I had with the car was basically a lexan wedge.  We raced on carpet that was stored on 12 foot wide rolls and duct taped together at the seams.  One race the tape came up at the seam.  The leading edge of the body caught the underside of the gap and the car disappeared under the carpet.

The car had its quirks.  The motor mount, for one, gave me fits.  The rear pod (as the motor mount box in the back was called) was just two metal supports with graphite over the top.  The motor had to be able to move, as changing gear sizes required being able to move the motor to compensate.  The motor mounts themselves were just a pair of grooves cut in the uprights that were wide enough to fit a motor mount screw.  It was trivially easy to jostle the motor out of place.  It happened in a race once when I had a pretty wide lead.  The race was a main, which meant it was the big one at the end for all the bragging rights.  I kept the car in the race even though it was emitting a ghastly whine and running incrementally slower with every lap.

I won the race by a hair or three, then retrieved my car.  The pinion (the smaller metal gear attached to the motor shaft) had cut a perfect groove right down the middle of the spur gear (the larger plastic gear attached directly to the rear axle.  There were no teeth left to speak of on the gear, either, which would explain why it was moving pretty slowly at the end.

In high school I needed to do a demonstration speech for speech class.  I decided to do my speech on how to assemble an R/C car.  I took the Pro-10, since it was a relatively simple car.  The speech went pretty well, except for the bit where I cut a few corners and didn’t fully assemble the car because it actually takes for-frickin’-ever to mount a couple dozen screws while talking about it.  I wasn’t using the car at the time so I never got around to fully reassembling it.  The pieces are still somewhere in my parents’ basement.

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Sometime around the beginning of high school one of my friends decided to upgrade from his first generation RC10T to an RC10T2.  His RC10T had the aluminum tub chassis and a lot of the cool upgrades, including Associated’s famous Stealth transmission.  I jumped at the chance to buy it.  I’d wanted a truck and I was tired of racing on road.

That was the golden age of stadium trucks, at least for us.  There were a bunch of us keeping the Associated/Losi rivalry alive but also racing each other for bragging rights.  Several of the guys had a competition going to see who could buy the coolest stuff and go the fastest.

I got the better end of that deal.  I didn’t spend a lot of money on upgrades, so I just made sure I knew how to drive.  I can still fondly remember weaving around my buddies while they went full-speed into walls because they didn’t understand the concept of braking into a turn.

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I wasn’t out of on road that long, though.  There was a big change in tech in the mid- to late ‘90s.  The old pan cars disappeared and were replaced with four wheel drive touring cars.  I don’t remember Associated or Losi jumping on that market.  I do know that I was a fairly early adopter, adding a HPI RS4 Sport to my collection sometime shortly after it was released in 1997.  The other big name in the touring car market, at least as far as I knew, was Schumacher, who had put out the SST 2000.

Then came happy, amazing news.  HPI was releasing the RS4-MT, a stadium truck version of the RS4.

I bought one almost immediately.  Or, at least, I bought one as soon as I could afford to.  It was the coolest thing in the world as far as I was concerned.

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I raced my last race in the spring of 2000.  My cars were both HPI, which was solely an after-market parts, tire, and motor manufacturer when I bought my Kyosho Raider.  The ESC in my RS4-MT was the Novak 410-M5 I’d put in that Kyosho Raider nearly a decade before.  The ESC in my RS4 was the 610-RV I’d bought a year or two later.

In the thirteen years since that race I pulled them out exactly one time.

Then, on Easter Sunday of 2013, a resurrection.


(L-R: RC10T, RS4, RS4-MT)


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[1]That hardware store’s hobby section had R/C car stuff, model trains, and RPG stuff for reasons that are completely beyond my comprehension.  I also used to get Ral Partha BattleTech minifigs there.  My BattleTech thing and my R/C car thing are oddly intertwined like that.  The week before I pulled my R/C cars out I pulled my BattleTech stuff out, set up a scenario, and played a game (against myself, because I’m weird like that).

In order to do that I had to come up with a way to create a temporary workspace.  I also decided to finally get around to finishing a Shadow Cat and Cauldron-Born minifig that I got a few years ago.




This, somehow, got me thinking about R/C cars.  Weirdly, the last time I put serious thought to one I also put serious thought to the other.  There was a power outage in the summer of 2007 that lasted for the better part of a week.  In order to pass the time I pulled out my BattleTech minifigs and my old Testors paint and painted (or, in a few cases, re-painted, including an Axeman that I’d completely and totally butchered but which is now one of my favorites) a bunch.

I was still seeing Amy at the time and I showed her what I was working on.  She, um, she didn’t get why I thought it was cool.  At around that time I also pulled my R/C stuff out to see if it worked.  I took my RS4-MT over to her place one night to show her what I was talking about.  She was nonplussed, to say the least.

There’s probably a lesson to be learned here, but fuck if I know what it is.

[2]”Turns” are a strange and wondrous thing that I never fully understood.  These were electric motors, so they consisted of a round can with magnets on the edge and a pole that went down the middle.  Wire was wrapped around the pole and the amount of wire determined the turns.  The higher the number of turns the slower the motor because, um, science, bitches.  I guess.  There was then a cut off somewhere in the neighborhood of 22-24 turns that switched from “stock” to “modified.”  Modified motors were generally faster.  They also had an additional signifier of “double,” “triple,” and, I suppose, “single.”  What that means is…um…I don’t know.  I mostly raced stock because stock motors were a lot cheaper than modified.  I was also usually running in some sort of formalized class where we all used similar equipment and kept track of points throughout the year.

I developed loyalties in motors, much like I developed loyalties in speed controls.  My ESCs were both Novak.  My motors were either Trinity or Reedy unless I was required to run something else.  The two best motors I had at the end were a Reedy Speedworks 17 turn modified and a Trinity Onyx 14 turn double from their SpeedGems series, which was the absolute shit.

[3]You might be noticing a pattern here…