Author Archives: Ovid

Violence is an Answer

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I thought about writing something when Luigi Mangione shot that healthcare CEO, but by the time I figured out what I wanted to write, the media had moved on. So thoughtful, then, for another lone shooter to kill an asshole in public yesterday.

When these things happen, there’s always an outpouring of sympathy for the victims and their families. Which makes sense; everyone is mourned by someone, even the worst people. But the other thing people say, the thing that drives me bananas, is this:

“Sure, I hated that guy, but violence doesn’t accomplish anything.”

Violence doesn’t accomplish anything? Speaking of bananas, the reason you can buy cheap bananas at every grocery store is because fruit companies hired mercenaries to depose unfriendly South American governments in the 50s. Violence is the reason we don’t have slavery in the US anymore. Violence doesn’t solve anything you say? Violence certainly fucking solved Hitler.

I think what people are saying when they say that violence accomplishes nothing, or that it has no place in our society, or that it’s counterproductive, is just that they’d rather we solve our problems without murdering each other. I agree, that would rule! A universal truth about humans is that we hate being murdered, so a world where nobody gets murdered sounds pretty appealing.

But violence does have a place in society. It’s the universal reserve currency. All property was, at some point, taken through violence, and if someone tries to steal it, violence is how we stop them. Animals fight over territory all the time, and we consider ourselves more civilized than those animals, but that’s not because we’ve replaced violence, it’s because we’ve built on top of it.

All laws are, in the end, backed by violence. When you threaten to call the cops on someone, you are threatening them with violence. When the bank sends someone to kick you out of your house, that’s violence. When the state locks someone up for ten years, that’s violence. The innovation we call society is really just the idea that only the government is allowed to do violence, to keep us from doing violence to each other.

But what if you don’t agree with the way the government is doing violence? What then? In theory, the government’s supposed to give you ways of expressing your displeasure. You can vote, you can protest, you can call your representatives, and the government will hear you and hopefully adjust its violence to suit your preferences. But supposing they don’t give a shit what you have to say? Well, then we’re back to violence.

It’s the universal reserve currency, after all. If the laws are backed by violence, and the government is the one ignoring the laws, then somebody’s gotta provide the violence. This is how you get coups and assassinations and whatnot. When a government starts, oh I don’t know, sending masked thugs to round up US citizens, blowing up boats full of civilians live on stream, and blatantly ignoring any and all legal challenges related to these things, we should expect a violent response.

Charlie Kirk wasn’t a part of the government, per se. Neither was the United Healthcare CEO who Luigi Mangione gunned down. They were representatives of an utterly rotten system, but their deaths won’t put a stop to that system. So why kill them? Why, twenty-four years ago today, did a gang of terrorists hijack planes full of innocent people and crash them on US soil? Because with no legal, civil, or moral recourse, people resort to the universal reserve currency.

I’m not trying to excuse violence. The world would be a better place without it. But we shouldn’t pretend it’s useless. It has a use, as a last resort. Politics by other means, when all other methods are ignored. People keep saying that violence isn’t the answer, but what if the question is “What are you gonna do, shoot me?”

Nobody Ever Taught Me How to Post

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One of my favorite jokes goes like this:

A guy gets sentenced to life in prison. His first night in lockup, after lights out, he hears someone way down the hall shout out “Twenty-seven!” And the whole cell block bursts out laughing. Once the laughter dies down, another voice calls out “Fifty-two!” and all the prisoners start laughing again. This continues for hours — just guys yelling out numbers, and laughing hysterically.

So the next morning the guy finds an old-timer out in the yard, and he asks him, “What was the deal with all those numbers last night?”

“Well,” says the old-timer, “we’ve all been in here so long, we’ve heard all the good jokes a hundred times each. So we assigned numbers to all of them, and now we just say the numbers. Everybody remembers the joke, and we all laugh.”

The guy figures he might as well learn all the jokes if he’s gonna be here for the rest of his life. He spends months studying, and learns them all by heart. He’s actually starting to enjoy listening at night. Finally, one night, he plucks up his courage, waits for a lull in the laughter, and calls out:

“Sixty-six!”

Dead silence. Eventually someone calls out another number, and everyone laughs. The guy retreats to the back of his cell and spends the rest of the night curled up on his cot, ashamed.

The next morning, he finds the old-timer in the yard again.

“What the hell happened last night?” he asks. “Sixty-six is a good joke. Why didn’t anybody laugh?”

“Ah, well,” the old man sighs. “Some people can tell ’em, and some people can’t.”

When it comes to posting, I often feel that I’m one of the people who can’t. I’ve alluded to this before, but when I was thirteen I had an account on SomethingAwful. I had an edgy username – Hypodermia – and I was eager to be a part of what felt like the gritty backstage of the internet. I was especially attracted to the FYAD subforum.

Short for “Fuck You And Die,” FYAD was an open-air prison for word criminals. The purpose was, in theory, to create a place where people could do all the heinous shit they wanted, so they wouldn’t do it in the regular-people forums. In practice it was a white-hot whirlwind of hate speech and unexpected buttholes. It was a place with no rules, and for me — a kid who was always worried about breaking rules — it seemed like a paradise.

So I lurked in FYAD, until I thought I understood the game. And finally, one night, I made my move. Thread title: something innocuous, like “milk.” Content: Thirty embedded images of meatspin.gif. It was poetry.

It was also a violation of one of FYAD’s only rules: no hotlinking to externally hosted media. The thread was immediately full of gleeful replies informing me of my error, summoning the mods, crowing about how I was about to be banned. In a sweaty panic I deleted the images, but the replies assured me this was not enough. They had screenshots. My posting career was over before it had begun.

I didn’t get banned, but I never posted on SomethingAwful again. I posted on other forums, but my threads never got any replies. Then Twitter came around, and I made an account, and posted jokes, but nothing I said garnered more than a few likes. Gradually, I came to the conclusion that I was one of the ones who can’t.

This ability to post, fluently and abundantly, is something I’ve heard referred to as “the soul of a true poster.” This mythical quality, the Crunchwrap Supreme of enlightened states, eludes me. Is it something one is simply born with, like a genetic disease? Or is it something that can be acquired, like a regular disease? I aim to find out.

Because I have a practical reason for being interested in this. Writing books is hard, but not half as hard as getting people to pay attention to them once they’re written. Modern publishers want authors who bring their own audiences, and my audience — as much as both of you fucking rule — is quite small. I want to find a way to be more known, and posting seems to be one of the main ways.

And yet, you see, that’s the same mistake I’ve been making for my whole posting career. My first and only post on FYAD wasn’t a reply to someone else’s thread. It was a bolt from the blue, a big flashing “LOOK AT ME” covered in spinning penises. My cardinal mistake — besides the hotlinking thing — was to treat these platforms not as community spaces, but as stages upon which to perform for a faceless audience.

What I find myself truly in need of, more than an audience, is a community. A community of artists with whom I can share work and inspiration. It’s not enough to go on Bluesky and scream jokes into the void. I need to, like, make friends.

That still requires posting, though. And my early experiences have made me low-key afraid of posting! So here’s what I’m going to do: for the next month, I’m gonna make one post a day on Bluesky. And as often as I can, I’m gonna try to make it a post responding to or engaging with someone else. It feels weird, in a time where we all agree that social media is destroying our minds, to resolve to use it more. But I’m tired of using my abstract objections to these platforms to shield myself from the embarrassment of trying to use them. I’m gonna give it a shot. It probably won’t actually kill me.

God Bless Explosions

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A man and woman stand beside each other in an open field under bright lights, filming a fireworks display for which they are responsible.

I have not been feeling very good about America lately, so the Fourth of July was a weird holiday. I like to do things on holidays. When I spend a holiday just sitting at home playing video games, like I would on a regular weekend, I feel antsy — sick, almost. Then again, I feel antsy and sick almost all the time now, things being how they are.

So we didn’t make plans for the Fourth. My wife and I ended up getting some franks from the grocery store and making Chicago dogs for two in our kitchen, and then we went for a walk to look at fireworks.

It is possible that the city where you live does not do fireworks the same way Chicago does fireworks. Chicago does fireworks like everybody’s forgotten that the city already burned down once. People are shooting up rockets in the middle of the street, with a recklessness that makes you wonder if they’ve got a stockpile of spare hands at home. It rules, unless you’re a dog.

So we wandered our neighborhood for a while, following the explosions, until we ended up at the park a few blocks from our house. There were probably about a hundred people scattered around the big baseball field, all trying to blow up different parts of it. Just as we arrived, someone’s rocket tube fell over in the middle of the baseball diamond, shooting missiles in every direction. People were dodging out of the way. There were children there. It was great.

Right by where we sat was a group of about 20 latinos of all ages, most of them dressed like they’d just come from a wedding reception. They were accompanied by a man in a red t-shirt who had seemingly acquired every box of fireworks in Illinois. As we watched in delight, this hero made trek after trek to the middle of the field, lighting off box after box of deafening pyrotechnics. And it was during this display that I began to understand something about being American.

Fireworks ain’t free. The amount this man was setting off easily cost thousands of dollars. He was very literally setting money on fire. And he was doing it in a public park, for the amusement of friends, family, and strangers. He was performing a glorious, violent public service.

The national anthem we sing at sports games is not the one about how beautiful our country is. It’s the one about the flag, surrounded in explosions. We are a nation of explosions — loud and bright, flashy and expensive. Other countries set off fireworks all the time, but only America saves up months of paychecks to set them off all at once. Our version of public-mindedness is a dude lighting a small arms depot on fire in the middle of a field.

It was generous of this man to put on this show for us. It was also a flex, a display of wealth and bravado. It was also an act of genuine bravery. This man, whose relatives are being actively hunted by this government’s gestapo at this very moment, had the guts to walk out into an open field and light a beacon. This is my sky, he said, I can fuck it up if I want to.

It didn’t make me proud, exactly — the destruction and the glamor and the flagrant display of wealth — but it did make me happy. A love of spectacle is in my blood. And it made me feel like a part of something. For one night, all of America shared a single sky, and almost all of it was on fire

Is Your Story Suffering From Big-Move-Itis?

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If you, like me, are a fan of the TV show Survivor, you may have noticed that many players self-sabotage in the mid-game. People get a few successful episodes under their belt and start thinking “Man, I ought to do something to really distinguish myself from the other contestants. What if I, for example, betray my closest ally? That’ll show everyone how unique and dynamic I am!!!” Fans of the show call this “big-move-itis”, and it’s almost always a dumb strategy. Players are valuing the uniqueness of their gameplay over the effectiveness of their strategy. It’s a bad idea in Survivor and it’s an even worse idea in creative writing.

I’ve seen it from students, from peers, and from supervisors. No one is immune. We are so inundated with content that it’s easy to feel as if we’ve got to do something tangible in order to make our stories unique. And if M. Night Shyamalan has taught us anything, it is that the most reliable way to make a story unique is with a thrilling twist. Just as the contestants on Survivor can’t wait to betray their allies in order to prove how clever they are, we writers are constantly tempted to betray our readers in order to prove that we were one step ahead of them all along.

And this works, sometimes! M. Night Shyamalan’s career gives us a very clear idea of just how infrequently it works. The dude hasn’t had a hit since Unbreakable. Having a reputation for out-of-nowhere twist endings, with nothing else of real substance to back it up, is kind of a death sentence. Once you know a guy is always trying to prank you, you stop letting him come into your house and balance buckets of paint over all your doorways. The poor guy has a classic case of big-move-itis, and it looks like it’s terminal.

What, then, is the cure? One thing that’s helped me is looking at examples of writers and entertainers who very clearly do not give a shit about surprising their audience. The first book that really made me think about this was Cat’s Cradle, by Kurt Vonnegut. In it, Vonnegut has a character give a very detailed description of a theoretically apocalyptic superweapon, Ice-nine, and then deny that it could possibly exist. If this were your average thriller, we’d spend the rest of the book wondering whether it does exist, before learning, in the climax, which character was secretly hiding it all along. But one sentence later, Vonnegut goes and says this:

There was such a thing as ice-nine. And ice-nine was on earth.

He literally does not give us even one sentence to wonder whether Ice-nine is real. And that shit is not even relevant for another twenty-five chapters! That knowledge is just free-floating, totally unnecessary, but he gives it to us anyway because he can’t be bothered to keep it a secret. In fact, twenty-five chapters later, when Ice-nine comes up again, it’s because Vonnegut is busy telling us that the new characters he just introduced are hiding it in their luggage. Again, this will not be relevant for quite a few pages, and the story’s narrator doesn’t even know about it yet! I thought about putting spoiler tags on this paragraph but then I realized that Vonnegut literally could not care less.

Sometimes — I’d argue usually — readers are more intrigued by things they know are coming than things they don’t. We know this. We know about Chekhov’s Gun. We know about Dramatic Irony. We know that Oedipus Rex is a banger even though the ending has been spoiled for literal millennia. I myself built my early career on retelling stories that everyone has already told. And yet when I am constructing a plot I still find myself fighting the overpowering urge to take the least obvious turn at every juncture. It comes from a lack of confidence in my work; the fear that if someone is allowed to look at my writing head-on, they’ll notice all its flaws. But that’s what makes openness such a baller move.

The greatest magic trick I’ve ever seen was performed by Daniel Madison on an early episode of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us. Go ahead and watch the video. I’ll be over here summarizing it. Here’s what happens:

  1. Daniel Madison tells everyone he’s going to deal a royal flush from a shuffled deck of cards, blindfolded
  2. Daniel Madison deals a royal flush from a shuffled deck of cards, blindfolded.

There is no confusion about what he is going to do. There’s no real suspense about whether or not he’ll actually do it. And yet, because of the sheer impossibility of the premise, it’s fascinating to watch. At the end of the trick, after some deliberation, Penn tells Daniel,

“I think we might be more impressed because we know what you did.”

He did not fool them! That’s literally the whole premise of the show, and he did not do it. He did something better. He amazed them, by putting his cards on the table with undeniable skill. That is what we should aspire to as storytellers — not tricking our readers, but performing tricks, tricks which are no less impressive when you know how they’re done.

Survivor players who succumb to big-move-itis don’t usually win. They tend to burn out before the late game, victims of the unnecessarily complicated game states which their own moves have created. The players who do win are the ones who carefully choose their moments, and make big moves in the service of some greater goal. Good twists exist, and there are plenty of reasons to hide information from your readers. But if you don’t know why you’re doing it, it’s probably best to let your case of big-move-itis run its course.

I Don’t Know What To Call Myself

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One of the categories that my book is sold under is “LGBTQ Sci Fi.” This is accurate – the main character, Orr Vue, is a man who loves another man. But it also feels like… stolen valor, in a way? It’s something I’ve been trying to get my head around as I do publicity for it.

I am a cis man, married to a cis woman, and I have loved men. I haven’t dated men, or slept with men, but I know what it’s like to think about a man all the time, to wonder what he thinks of me, to take any excuse to spend more time with him, to have the contours of his body appear in my mind unannounced.

But the truth is, my attraction to men has never been quite strong enough to overcome my fear of the consequences of acting on it. In a world less rigidly divided, I probably would’ve dated men. But when I was a teenager, “bi” meant “gay” and “gay” meant “bad,” at least as far as men were concerned. I clung to my attraction to women, as if it were a talisman that would protect me from scorn. I had the luxury to choose to pass.

So yeah, writing a protagonist who fucks men, in a world where nobody cares who he fucks, was cathartic for me. But even so, when people talk to me about the queerness of the book, they often refer to Orr as gay. And don’t get me wrong, I’d certainly rather they call him gay than straight. But Orr is very obviously horny around women, too. He’s horny around everybody. He’s a trash-talking, hard-partying disaster pansexual. And yet for many people, all that nuance is erased the moment he makes out with a dude. It’s the exact tendency that teenage-me was afraid of. I push back against it where I can.

So yes, there are queer elements in the book. And yes, those queer elements come from my own experience, at least to a certain extent. So why do I feel like a fraud when my book is labeled “LGBTQ fiction”? Well, because even though I know what it feels like to love men, I don’t know what it feels like to suffer for it.

I’ve never been ostracised for my preferences. I’ve never had other men fear me or threaten me because of who I love, or what they fear about themselves. I’ve never had preachers or politicians single me out, make me a scapegoat. Have I been repressed? Maybe. Afraid of the fullness of myself? Probably. But I have always been “safe.” And categorizing books is, at the end of the day, a marketing tactic. I don’t feel entirely comfortable benefiting from a classification that I don’t think I’ve “earned” with suffering.

But I don’t want to erase that part of the book either, any more than I want to erase that part of myself. I hope someone will read my book who feels the way I do about all this — who dreams of a world where loving whoever you want isn’t a political statement. So I guess I feel the same way about the genre classification as I do about my own attractions: there are no easy answers, no simple divisions. And maybe that’s the point.

Two Truths and a Lie

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So, huge news, I have a novel coming out March 4th. It’s called Two Truths and a Lie, and you can preorder it here.

I have been working with the good people at Pantheon Books to make this happen for the past TWO YEARS. It was going to come out last November but we decided we didn’t want current events to distract from the book release, so we moved the release to a time when current events would be totally normal and not distracting at all (lol, lmao). The good news is, now you can use my book to distract you from current events!

Nice people always ask me: “What is the best way for me to buy your book so it helps you the most?” The answer is, either preorder it (helps with stats), or have your local indie bookstore order it for you (they’ll sometimes order extra copies if they see there’s interest, plus indie bookstores are good). But honestly as long as you find some way to read it, I’m happy.

But read what, you might ask? How can I expect you to buy/read something when you don’t know anything about it? Well here’s the first paragraph of the book jacket summary:

“In a mostly underwater near-future Los Angeles, aging combat-drone veteran Orr Vue now lives a simple and small life, trading snippets of what’s become the most valuable currency: information. So when the cops show up at his door looking for data on a murder he’s not even aware has happened, things get interesting for the first time in 25 years.“

But you could read that pretty much anywhere on the internet. What you really need is a taste of what’s in the book. So the rest of this post is just going to be the first page and a half of the book. Check it out:

The L.A. sun squeezed in through my building’s cracked roof and poured itself onto the sheet-metal ceiling of my compartment, cooking me awake almost an hour before my kortiko would’ve zapped me conscious otherwise. Mornings are worthless. Nobody wants to buy a memory of bloodshot eyeballs and nostalgia for last night’s liquor, so my archives are loaded with identical copies of the same seven minutes of suffering, stretching all the way back to when I took the fact-checking gig at InfoDrip a decade and a half ago. Still better than your job, though.

I have some sympathy for you, since we’re in the same business. Difference for me was, I corrected a higher class of information than you kids on the municipal blockchain. More work to verify, but worth more. I’m sure most of the stuff you get on commission is nothing but conspiracy theories– “No, the mole men are not invading your teeth,” “Yes, gravity is a universal force, unaffected by how much raw beef you eat.” This, I assure you, is not that. Listen till the end, and I promise to make this submission worth your while. And, just for you, I’ve included plenty of irrelevant detail to line your pockets with. So where was I?

Right. A perfectly awful Wednesday morning in July. I peeled off sheets that would’ve been drier if I’d pissed in them and began the forty-five minute process of convincing my atrophied muscles to crawl out of bed and carry me to work. My commute was five steps long, bed to table. At my age, that’s five steps too long, but I find that if I stay in bed to work my spine’s a solid rod by the end of the day, and not the kind of solid rod I like. At the table, I poured myself a bowl of Grape-Nuts drowning in caffeinated milk and slapped a handful of knockoff Think tablets into my mouth. Gotta keep the brain slippery, as the kids say. I stuck a lunch pack to my arm, strapped the Frosty to my face, and — with nothing else to do — made the fateful decision to clock in forty-five minutes early.

The InfoDrip buffer slid over my brain from back to front, giving my eyeballs the feeling of being goosed from behind. It’s the worst feeling in the world. Well, okay, no, not technically the worst (I’m not giving you such an easy excuse to invalidate and collect this submission, checker), but I’m sure you’ll agree it’s a bad one. You sit there all day, in the back of your mind, fully aware that your brain is doing something, but unable to observe the smallest sliver of it. Can’t have us actually knowing any of the data we interact with, can they? That’d be financial suicide. Anyway, if you know how the buffer works — and I know you do — you’ll understand why I didn’t hear the cops come in. What you might not understand is why I screamed at them anyway.

And it only gets weirder and nastier from there. It’s been an incredible journey, taking this thing from first draft to actual published novel(!!!) and that path began, in many ways, with this here website. So thank you to everyone reading this, whether you’ve been here since the beginning, or are only just joining. Without you, I’d just be talking to myself.

Getting Owned by America’s Frenemy

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I’m sorry, but this DeepSeek AI stuff is funny as shit.

Like, OpenAI has spent the last ten years systematically stealing content from everyone’s websites (including this one!!!) so that it can feed it into its hungry hungry data hole and shit out a robot that lies about everything and doesn’t know what hands are. This process has somehow required billions of dollars and so much electricity that massive corporations are actually considering funding renewable energy — not for good reasons, obviously; just so we can render higher fidelity anime titties. And then last week, a Chinese hedge fund releases an open source algorithm called DeepSeek that does everything OpenAI’s thieving bullshit machine can do, except better, and cheaper, and without being run by a pompous dipshit named Sam Altman who keeps talking about how scary his own product is. So BILLIONS of dollars of imaginary money disappears overnight as everyone realizes Sam Altman and NVIDIA and all the crypto bros gnawing on the rotting carcass of twitter were actually full of shit this whole time, and then — AND THEN — today AliBaba comes out and says it’s releasing an AI model that is even CHEAPER AND BETTER THAN DEEPSEEK. This is what pushed me over the edge. I am the joker now. I just asked deepseek where to buy clown makeup and now I am walking down the middle of the highway, typing this post on my phone with one hand while constantly firing a shotgun into the air.

I mean, somebody has got to be lying about something here, right? Either DeepSeek is lying about having made their thing for so cheap, or OpenAI has been lying about how expensive their shit was for the last ten years. OR, as OpenAI has started saying, maybe DeepSeek just stole all of OpenAI’s data and used it to train their better model for cheaper, which raises the question — why didn’t OpenAI just steal its own model to make a better one, instead of waiting for a Chinese hedge fund to do it?

No matter who’s telling the truth, one thing is certain: This is fucking hilarious. It’s hilarious that OpenAI, a company that was literally founded on stealing shit is now loudly complaining that their shit has been stolen. It’s hilarious that China is now competing with itself to see who can dunk on Sam Altman the hardest. And it’s hilarious that this clown fiasco is being heralded in some circles as a “pernicious vector of Chinese foreign influence” or “a national security threat,” when, as far as Chinese foreign influence is concerned, this feral hog of a country has been cooked for longer than OpenAI has been stealing everybody’s porn.

Flash back to 1994. Warner Brothers starts selling a few movies in China. They do pretty well, because up to this point the only movie anyone has had to watch over there is “This is How Good the Government is Part 6: Censored Version.” So Hollywood starts releasing more of their movies in China, and they’re making money, but there’s a problem: If anybody in Hollywood even THINKS about releasing a movie that pisses off the Chinese Communist Party, (even if they don’t release it in China!!!) China throws a fucking fit. That company gets shut out entirely, and they lose access to all those Chinese movie dollars. So Disney, and Sony, and all the other companies I hate all quietly stop making movies that criticize China, or have Chinese bad guys, or imply that Tibet might be a real country. This continues for decades. The Chinese markets get bigger, and the CCP starts demanding more and wilder shit. Like, did you know they don’t like time travel movies for some reason? Yeah, nobody even really understands why!!! But that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from scrapping a bunch of them!!!

Because, see, it’s expensive to make a movie, and then send it to Chinese censors, and then wait for them to tell you what they think is wrong with it. So instead what ends up happening is that big movie studios try to guess ahead of time what China won’t like, and just keep that shit out of their movies to begin with. And this is how you end up with weird Chinese product placement in American blockbusters, and generic plots about characters who never quite seem to challenge authority, and I swear this is related to DeepSeek, just bear with me.

See, we’re used to thinking of propaganda as something countries intentionally do to their own people, like how Call of Duty is obviously an advertisement for the US Army. And I think a lot of people are aware that American entertainment has historically been used to influence other countries, too. But I don’t think enough people realize that China has been making us do their propaganda for them for the last thirty years. Our movies are still allowed to call out our own government for being insane and corrupt. We’re allowed to mock our own politicians. But for the last three decades — and I didn’t even realize this until I started to actually think about it — nobody has said shit about the Chinese. And everybody was fine with this as long as studios were making money. But then TikTok started beating Instagram, and DeepSeek started beating OpenAI, and all the rich fuckboys who populate our crypto oligarchy are suddenly whining that China is baaaaad and all their technology is eeeeevil and it needs to be baaaaaanned. And despite their obviously cynical financial motives, most of that shit is probably true! And they’re gonna get what they want in the end, because they’re basically the government. But what makes this so funny is that most of us have spent the majority of our lives consuming propaganda that makes us extremely unsympathetic to the American position — propaganda which was produced by American megacorporations! And now they’re mad about it! Holy shit!

So I guess what I’m saying is, Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and all the other men I hate should stop shaking their tiny fists at the great nation of China. Chinese ingenuity is unmatched, their economy thriving, their industry tireless. I should know! I learned it from watching movies!

Shit has been unreal lately

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When I was a teenager, I stumbled across a website on lucid dreaming – that is, the practice of realizing you’re dreaming, while you’re dreaming, so that you can do cool shit like fly around and have sex. The website was text-only on a gray background, the most web 1.0 shit you can imagine. The text laid out a very simple protocol for inducing lucid dreams:

  1. Every morning, immediately after waking, write down your dreams.
  2. From these dream transcripts, compile a list of things that commonly appear in your dreams.
  3. While awake, whenever you see one of these things, check to see if you are dreaming. This is often referred to as “reality testing,” and there are a number of methods:
    • Look at some text, look away, then look back to see if it has changed.
    • Try flipping a lightswitch on and off, to see if it behaves predictably.
    • Ask someone if you are dreaming, to see if you get a straight answer.
  4. Eventually, you will develop a habit of checking whether you are dreaming, and that habit will carry over into your dreams. At some point, you will think to check if you are dreaming, while you are dreaming, and then congratulations, you have achieved lucid dreaming.

This procedure is simple, but extremely difficult in practice. It only works if it’s applied consistently over months or years. Consistent dream journaling is critical for improving recall, and constant reality testing is necessary in order to build a habit that will survive the transition to the dream world. In total, I’ve managed maybe a dozen lucid dreams using this method. And even when I do manage to become lucid, my brain has many tricks for undoing my hard work. I will become lucid, and then dream of waking up, only to enter another dream that I am no longer aware is a dream. I will become lucid, and then find myself presented with some sort of crisis which demands I put aside my lucidity to handle it — I might be handed an armful of precious eggs to carry, for example, or find that my clothes are unraveling. Lucid dreaming is hard, because the mind does not want to be lucid. And I think this explains a lot about our waking world.

One thing you learn while studying lucid dreaming is that we spend a lot of time non-lucid while we’re awake, as well. Like, do you usually remember your drive home from work? Or does your brain sort of turn off for a while, and only check back in when you’re in the driveway? How well do you remember the last meal you ate? If you live in a city, I can almost guarantee that there are houses on your block that you have never even seen before, despite walking past them every day. A lucid dreaming practice is as much about improving waking lucidity as sleeping lucidity. Because again, the mind does not want to be lucid.

The internet, where I learned about this shit in the first place, makes everything way more difficult. Things which would strain credulity in the analog world are commonplace in digital worlds. You can go to a concert where Travis Scott comes crashing out of the purple sky like a meteor and demolishes a seaside carnival. You can look at a photograph of Jesus Christ made out of shrimp. You can be added to a group chat full of strangers all waxing poetic about a new currency with a made-up name. You can do all of these things while you are at your job. You can do them while you are naked. You can work remote, and be naked while you are at your job. And it is impossible to reality test any of this.

If you look away from a line of text in your browser, it could very easily change while you’re not looking. Pressing a button on a webpage usually works, but it might stop working at a moment’s notice for no obvious reason. And as for asking someone online whether you’re dreaming? Well, try getting a straight answer from someone online about anything.

The internet also has a flattening effect on sensory experience. Obviously, part of this is the literal flattening effect of a screen, but there’s something else going on, too. Everything is equally close. Everything is equally important. Everything is equally true, and loud, and threatening.

The Tibetan Yogas of Dream and Sleep introduces the idea that a dream practice is important because dreams are where our minds have the liberty to go all-in on whatever dumb patterns we keep falling into. Like, technically (according to the book), you’re never actually experiencing reality, just a story your brain is telling you, loosely based on sensory data. In your dreams, even that sensory data is gone, so all you get are the stupidest possible expressions of your emotional bullshit. If you’re a person who gets angry a lot, surprise, a lot of your dreams are gonna be about assholes who deserve it. I love being right, so last night I had a dream that I was playing devil’s advocate about school policy with a scornful English teacher, and I awoke still composing rebuttals to the points she’d made. Like, to be clear, I was full-ass awake, in the shower, still thinking about how I would argue with a person who was literally not real. And in that dream, we were not arguing in person. We were arguing in a group DM.

Traditionally, sensory data in the waking world serves to interrupt the patterns our brains like to follow, but social media actively reinforces them. It is easy to fill your feed with only content that triggers your habitual emotions. In fact, left unattended, your feeds will do this on their own. How many times have you read a post about something you hated, and then kept reading? How many times have you joined a parade of other anonymous people, all dunking on an equally anonymous person who said something you don’t agree with? How often have you blacked out while scrolling through five-second videos, only to realize an hour has passed?

The only time I see something akin to reality testing on the modern internet is when we’re trying to determine if something was made by AI. We search for repeating patterns in text. We examine the backgrounds for amorphous figures. We check the hands. But as the models improve, the methods of detection seem to become more and more vibes-based, and more of our parents depart into a dream world where Shrimp Jesus tells them to like and subscribe. We are witnessing a total collapse of reality, a point where fact-checking is useless, where the noise is the signal, where all we can trust are the people and objects in our immediate vicinity, and sometimes not even those. In times like this, a lucid dreaming practice starts to seem almost practical.

There are other, easier ways to induce lucid dreaming. You can schedule a sound to play in the middle of the night — something you can hear while dreaming — which will serve as a signal to become lucid. Similarly, there are plenty of tricks for reducing the pernicious influence of social media. You can uninstall the YouTube app from your phone, turn websites monochrome, install Chrome extensions that remind you how long you’ve been scrolling. These techniques are effective at addressing the immediate symptoms of non-lucidity. But our brains do not want to be lucid. Until we address this underlying fact, with long and careful practice, we will keep waking up into another dream, and another, and another.

“Real” “Self” “Defense”

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When I was depressed in my 20s, I used to fantasize about getting in a bar fight. I would imagine myself leaving my apartment in the middle of the night, going to one of Chicago’s many corner bars, finding some loud asshole and actively provoking him until it came to blows. It would be quick, and painful, and triumphant, and real. To this day, I’m still trying to understand why that was the fantasy I had. Especially because all the available evidence suggests I would have lost that fight badly.

I’ve trained in several martial arts: American Kenpo when I was a kid, Chinese Kenpo and Judo in college, Brazilian Jiu Jitsu briefly after grad school, and Capoeira even more briefly last year. In theory, I should at least be somewhat prepared for a bar fight. In practice, the only actual physical altercation I’ve ever been in was when I traded sucker punches with another seventh grader after PE.

According to the videos my YouTube algorithm has been serving me lately, though, none of my martial arts training would have mattered in a bar fight anyway. Accounts like Karate by Jesse and Martial Arts Journey with Rokas continually hammer home one critical point: martial arts learned in a gym in no way prepares a person for a real street fight. The martial arts I learned — from the practiced forms of karate, to the impressive throws of judo, to the stylized dance moves of capoeira — have nothing to do with the swift, chaotic, and bloody reality of an actual combat situation. Even at the jiu jitsu school where I briefly studied, the general opinion seemed to be that if you wanted to learn real fighting, you needed to study mixed martial arts.

Mixed Martial Arts — MMA — is a relatively modern term for an ancient practice. Since ancient Greece, dudes have been getting into the ring with other dudes and trying to beat the shit out of each other with minimal rules governing the fight. MMA fights are full contact, and are generally decided by either knockout or submission. Mixed martial artists combine elements from many different combat arts to create a style that is optimized for “real” fighting.

But how real is it, really? Certainly, a trained MMA fighter would have better luck than I would in a bar fight, but MMA fights still have rules. Nobody ever pulls a knife or a gun. Nobody gets ganged up on by three guys. Everybody wears special equipment, and everybody shows up to the ring knowing exactly when and where the fight will happen. Basically, MMA is bullshit for babies. It’s not true self-defense. What we need is a competition that tests competitors in realistic self-defense scenarios. What we need… is the Ultimate Self Defense Championship.

The USDC is a mid-budget YouTube series published by Martial Arts Journey with Rokas, which recently sucked me in after appearing on my feed. The premise is simple: six contestants from different fighting backgrounds compete in a series of reality-show-style challenges meant to simulate actual street-fighting conditions. Players are asked to survive for thirty seconds while trapped in a small room with a knife attacker, for example, or serve as bouncers at an extremely chaotic night club. Each participant is assigned points based on their performance in each challenge, and the person with the most points at the end wins, just like in a real street fight.

The series is pretty goofy, and fun to watch. I particularly enjoyed the good-natured and totally incompetent Shaolin monk, Ranton, and the eminently practical “regular guy” contestant, Craig. But it wasn’t until Episode 5 when I finally understood what the show was doing.

Episode 5 takes place on a moving bus. The idea is to simulate combat in a more realistic setting, rather than the clean open floor plan of a martial arts dojo. Combat’s not the only thing that’s being simulated, though. The twenty minute episode is packed to the brim with basically every male fear.

To begin, a junkie sits down next to the contestant and starts openly shooting heroin on the bus. He eventually gets belligerent and needs to be beaten into submission. Then, the contestant is unexpectedly jumped by two guys at once. After fighting off those attackers, a man sits down next to him and starts sexually harassing him, kissing him and grabbing at his penis until the contestant threatens or fights him. Next, a couple sits down in front of the contestant, and the man starts hitting the woman. If the contestant interferes, the woman turns on him. Finally, the contestant is mugged by a guy with a knife. Bottom line, this is the worst bus imaginable, and the creators of USDC spent a long time imagining it.

Now, I realized while writing this that I’ve experienced versions of nearly all of these scenarios, and written about most of them on this website. I used to spend a lot of time with junkies in the park by my house. I was propositioned for sex by a man on a train. My first week in Chicago, I was mugged. And one time, on a train in Germany, I watched a man brutally beat his girlfriend in an argument over a case of beer. That’s the only one I never wrote a full post about, because it’s the only one I’m ashamed of. After a man rushed past me to break up the fight, and the attacker fled, the one who intervened walked back to me and asked: “Why didn’t you do something?”

The answer to that question is the same as it was in all the other scenarios I wrote about: when these things happen, I don’t fight. I talk, or concede, or freeze, or try to leave. I’m afraid of what will happen to me if I fight. And I’m ashamed of that fear.

That’s the fantasy of “real” self defense — freedom from the shame of fear. In a video on USDC contestant Jesse Enkamp’s YouTube channel, during a discussion with a knife defense coach, both Jesse and the instructor admit that they’ve never been in a real fight. These men aren’t learning self-defense because their lifestyles demand it. They’re learning self-defense to reassure themselves that if a man did grab their penis in public, they would have the strength to hurt him, rather than endure it.

The knife instructor in Enkamp’s video primarily teaches self defense to police officers. Of all the civilian professions, police officer is probably the one which most directly contends with fear and the shame that accompanies it. The news is full of police officers who would rather kill than be afraid. In the season of USDC that I watched, the winner was an MMA fighter from Israel, who spoke numerous times about the fear and paranoia he experienced at home. I trust that the parallel here is obvious.

This finally answers the question of why I used to fantasize about winning a bar fight. In the struggle to escape fear and shame and helplessness, the core symptoms of depression, there is no quicker expedient than justified violence. And violence, we know, is only ever justified as “self defense.”

Chill Hangs with Violent Men

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Last weekend I was at the comic shop playing Magic, and I got paired with a guy of a sort you would not normally expect to meet in a comic shop playing Magic: a lifelong competitive athlete. This guy had the sort of physique I sometimes covet: thick arms, broad shoulders, the kind of body that makes every t-shirt look like workout gear. He told me he’d been a triathlete before he got hit by a car while training on his bike, and lost all his front teeth (they’d been replaced skillfully. I never would have known). Then he’d been a boxer, until he noticed how all the older trainers were jittery with CTE. He’d done natural bodybuilding for a while, but didn’t like the diets, or the feeling of all those eyes on him. So he’d settled into the comparatively gentle sport of no-gi Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

This guy did tournaments. In jiu-jitsu, tournament matches are decided by submission — that is, they go until one player either falls unconscious from being strangled, or gives up by tapping out. To force their opponents to tap out, a jiu-jitsu player might try strangling them, or they might utilize a “joint lock” or “arm bar,” two techniques which boil down to “put one of your opponents limbs in a position where you can really fuck it up if they don’t tap out.” Most matches end this way. But sometimes, my new friend told me, there are people who won’t tap out.

Maybe they’re too carried away with adrenaline, or a desire to win, so that they ignore the pain. Or maybe it’s a kind of dare: I know you won’t actually break my arm, you weenie. I don’t need to tap out. Either way, the athlete said, the solution was simple: you break their arm.

“People are so used to being honorable, you know… so used to pulling back before they hurt each other, that they might not have the…” he gestured sheepishly, “the grit to actually follow through. And maybe some people take advantage of that.” But he did have the grit. And when it was necessary, he had broken arms in competition.

This experience was so alien to me, because I am definitely one of those people who lacks the grit to break an arm in competition. At least I think I am. I’ve never had to find out. I’ve dabbled in martial arts, but never at a competitive level, and sparring in the gym there’s always a tacit understanding: we’re all quite attached to our faces and limbs and genitals, so let’s try not to fuck those up for each other, yeah?

Beyond that, I’ve never been in a fight at all, beyond a few sucker punches exchanged in middle school. Which is why I am always so fascinated when I get to talk to people who have. People for whom violence isn’t merely theoretical.

Several years ago, after a charity Dungeons and Dragons event, I ended up in a car with a guy of a sort you don’t expect to meet at a charity Dungeons and Dragons event: a former US Marine Scout Sniper. Obviously he had killed people — we moved past that part of the conversation very quickly — but he also had a theory about violence that he was happy to share.

“In the 60s,” he told me, “there was a sexual revolution, where people began to feel comfortable saying ‘I’m a sexual person.’ I think we’re going to come to a point in our society where people can say, ‘I’m a violent person.’ Because I am a violent person. And right now it’s not acceptable for me to say that, but it’s true, it’s part of who I am.”

While not a super reassuring thing to hear from a stranger in a car late at night, he was getting at something real: violence, like sex, is one of the most intense activities human beings engage in, and like sex, there are all sorts of taboos about when to do it and how much you’re allowed to enjoy it. Most people only allow themselves to fulIy engage with these things when they’re heavily altered: drunk, or sad, or angry. But my friend in the car wasn’t a drunk person, or a sad person, or an angry person as far as I could tell. He spoke casually, conversationally, in the same friendly tone the jiu-jitsu player used to describe breaking his opponents’ legs. If this violent man had not joined the Marines, he might never have found a culturally-sanctioned arena in which to explore that part of his identity. But he had joined up, and he had killed people, and that had made him realize something, and he had carried that realization back into civilian life, and into that car, where he calmly told me he was a violent person.

I am 34 years old, and I have never seen a dead body outside of a casket. All of my grandparents have died. My brother has died. A close friend committed suicide. I never saw their bodies. They were all burned before I could see them. It’s hard for me to imagine how my mind would be different if I had not only seen death, but participated in it. Which is why I ask so many questions when I meet people who have.

So much of the luxury we enjoy is the result of heavily abstracted killing: the meat we eat, the gas in our cars, our diamonds, our bananas. What would it be like to have that abstraction removed? To fight in a war, or work in a slaughterhouse? To step through the veil and suddenly see only the killing, and none of the rewards? It must feel like seeing reality for the first time. No wonder we seem like fools to soldiers. No wonder they don’t want to talk to us about “what they’ve done.” A former sniper used to beg for change outside my grad school. One time I asked him who he’d killed.

“Enemies,” he said, and laughed.

My friend at the comic book shop had never killed anyone, at least not as far as I know. He wasn’t even playing jiu-jitsu lately, since he’d torn a ligament in his left shoulder while sparring.

“Do you wanna see something gross?” he asked. “When they did the surgery, the doctor took a photo.”

In the photo, the skin of his shoulder was held wide open, horizontal black marker lines visible on either side of the wound so that they could line them up to sew it back together. Inside was meat. Pink meat, like raw pork.

“It’s crazy, right?” the guy said, smiling with his perfect, artificial teeth. This guy who’d had his body broken and reassembled at least twice — who’d broken other peoples’ bodies just the same. If anybody knew deep down that people are just meat, you’d think it would be him. But maybe “just meat” is reductive, a casual shorthand used by cruel machine intelligences in science fiction. Maybe it’s more accurate to say our bodies are also meat. That beyond everything we call human — our rules, our languages, our false teeth and tight clothes — there is another world of blood and bone and ligaments. Only a few people see that world, and when they do, it changes them, in ways they don’t even always notice.

But I notice, and I try to understand. And it makes it very difficult for me to eat pork.