Category Archives: I Got Opinions

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.

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.”

Chasing the High Score

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When I was about 18, I used to participate in an online… game? It was called sf0, and its website, sf0.org, now throws a bad gateway error, so you’ll have to take my word for what was on it. SF0 called itself a “collaborative production game,” which basically meant that all the players were doing weird art or art-adjacent activities proposed by other players, and the “gameplay” was posting about those activities on the website. That wasn’t what it felt like, though.

What SF0 felt like was being in a secret society. I would go out into the world and, say, create a scavenger hunt that led from inside a voting booth, through a donut shop, and to a nearby park, and nobody would know why aside from my fellow players on the site. Other folks were out there tying rocks to themselves and sinking to the bottom of the ocean just to see if they could escape, or hiding counterfeit eggs in grocery stores. At one point I collected almost a hundred traffic cones. To this day I have no idea what I was planning to do with them. When my parents got sick of me keeping them around the side of my house, I gave them to another player from the site.

A hugely important part of “tasking” in sf0 was about documentation. Posts on the site (“proofs” or “praxis”) took the form of prose descriptions of what had been done, interspersed with photos and videos supporting the story. Other players would then award points to the tasks they liked the most, from a limited pool determined by their own scores. The artistry and showmanship of the post was sometimes as important as the task completion itself. Sometimes moreso.

My score was deeply important to me. It validated my art. I could look at one of my tasks and see precisely how much people liked it. The highest scoring completion of a given task was awarded a little fleur-de-lys medal which appeared at the top of the post. If one of my tasks didn’t get that badge, I felt as if I’d failed.

I was never the highest scorer on the site overall (that title was held by the guy I gave the traffic cones to), but I was up there. Whenever I submitted a new proof, I would refresh the page over and over again, hoping for new comments and points. This was my first introduction to the hedonic treadmill of online content production.

I would spend days or weeks on tasks. I would deliberately put myself in dangerous situations — I purposely stranded myself in San Diego so that I could hitch-hike home and leave little gifts in each car that picked me up. I nearly got arrested trying to break into the post office so that I could mail a letter from inside. My focus gradually shifted from adding whimsy to the real world, to proving to my friends online how whimsical I was.

There was a task on the site which simply said, “Walk 25 miles.” A few months after my 20th birthday, I attempted to complete this task in a single day while walking the Camino de Santiago. My thinking was that if I did it in a single day, as part of a walking journey of more than 300 miles, I was practically guaranteed the high score.

I was carrying a backpack that was too heavy for me, and had already been walking for weeks. On the day I completed the task, I had been walking for so long that I had to pitch a tent in an unsheltered spot on the side of the road. There was a rainstorm that night, and my tent leaked, and my right hip was in excruciating pain which I still feel echoes of to this day. Worse: I had no idea how I was going to document it.

I didn’t have a phone with GPS. I hadn’t taken any pictures. When I finally made my post a couple weeks later, it was just text interspersed with a few google maps images of the path I’d walked. It felt lifeless. No one interacted with it much. I felt exhausted. It was a feeling I would have again, several years later, the first time I decided to discontinue this blog.

I stopped playing sf0 shortly after that. I still think of it fondly. It taught me a different way of seeing the world, and expanded my idea of what was possible. But I stopped playing because I had turned the game itself into a burden. The points on sf0 were meant to be an incentive to go out into the world and do cool shit. And they were! Until the metric became the target, and I started making content for the website. 

This is something I see missing from the conversation around YouTube and burnout. Yes, platforms like YouTube mistreat and manipulate their creators in order to make them dependent on the platform. But also, this only works because of something inside of us. SF0 was not trying to manipulate me the way YouTube manipulates its creators, and yet I ended up in a similar place because I was manipulating myself. 

Part of that was the effect of putting numbers on things, yes, but are numbers the reason that  Philosophy Tube, has gone from relatively dry discussions of philosophy to a full-blown theatrical productions? Is Mr Beast shooting up to 12,000 hours of footage for a single 15-minute video just for the views? We do these things, at least in part, because we love them, and we love that other people love them, and that kind of love is addictive.

So, bottom line, I understand why so many YouTubers are burning out and quitting, and why others are searching for a more sustainable business model. Eventually the points stop being worth it, and you have to find a way back to what you once enjoyed about the activity, back before it was worth anything. It’s the paradox of creative work: I want my art to be seen, but I don’t want to want it.

I think the wave of people qutting Youtube and getting off social media might mean we’re finally getting over the idea of putting numbers on everything. My hope is that we’ll leave behind the metrics but keep the targets: the reasons we made art in the first place. But the way we respond to our audience’s applause also says something about us, and that something remains true whether we’re “creating content” or just making stuff.

sf0.org is down. All of my points are gone. But I’ve still got my stories, and my pride.

Suck My Nuts, Joseph Campbell

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Since Joseph Campbell first described the Hero’s Journey in his “Hero With a Thousand Faces”, it has seized the popular imagination. Lots of people have based their whole careers on it: Dan Harmon, whose “circle theory” of story crafting has netted him a lot of creative success; George Lucas, who literally rewrote Star Wars after he read Hero with a Thousand Faces; Stanley Kubrik was into Campbell too, and so are the dozens if not hundreds of screenwriters and bloggers peddling books that promise systems guaranteed to help you write your way out of creative block. So clearly the Hero’s Journey works. Harmon and Lucas and Kubrik are all very successful, and some of their stuff is pretty good!  And man, I would love to believe that there is a universal human story which transcends time and culture, which speaks to something deep in our collective unconscious. That would be so convenient. Because if there was really only one story, or at least only one good story, that would mean everybody could just write that and we could solve fiction forever! But…

The monomyth is not, in fact, the only myth. It turns out there are other stories, too. And what’s crazy about it is that those other stories are often the same stories that we impose the Hero’s Journey onto. Check it out: some linguists did a study where they showed the same video to speakers of a bunch of different languages. This is the video they showed them. It’s a pretty normal video. Some stuff happens in it, then it’s over. What’s interesting is what happened when the researchers asked speakers of different languages to describe what they’d just seen. It turns out people had wildly different answers depending on their native tongue. Think about how you would summarize that video. If you’re like most English speakers, you probably tried to come up with a rough narrative chronology of the things that happened. But you could just as easily have ignored the events altogether and described the landscape, the way speakers of some other languages did. Events that some speakers skipped were vitally important to others. What people described had very little to do with what was actually there, and much more to do with who they were. 

Joseph Campbell published The Hero With a Thousand Faces in 1949. At the time, psychoanalysis was a new field, and everybody was just getting acquainted with the works of Freud and Jung. Campbell’s concept of the monomyth is heavily influenced by Jung – just as a lot of modern thinking about stories still is today! But we’ve had more than seventy years of philosophy since Campbell. It’s time to admit that he didn’t discover something that was secretly true about all stories the whole time. Joseph Campbell, a white, American  dude from the 1940s, came up with one possible reading that happens to fit a lot of stories, and a significant number of our most influential writers and filmmakers since then have been following his formula like it’s scripture and not, you know, an interpretation of scripture. I think it’s high time that someone (me) stood up and challenged Campbell’s beloved interpretation – and not just because my book briefly outsold his on Amazon.

Just like with the video in the linguistics experiment, there are other ways to describe the same stories. And if we truly want to advance as a culture, I think it is the responsibility of our storytellers to explore new ways of seeing and telling stories. Because there is one part of the Hero’s Journey that is badly in need of revision: The Hero.

No, I’m not saying we need fewer heroes and more gritty antiheroes. I’m not even saying we need fewer heroes and more “regular dudes.” No, I’m straight up saying we need fewer heroes period (and also fewer dudes, but that’s another essay). To me, the central problem with Campbell’s monomyth is that it focuses on the transformation of a single person.

Think about A New Hope. Think about Iron Man. Think about A Clockwork Orange. All of them center around the trials and transformation of a single individual. Now think about Jeff Bezos. Elon Musk. Donald Fucking Trump. Think about every rich asshole who’s collected an army of simps by selling the bogus idea that they made it entirely on their own. It might seem kind of bonkers to draw a straight line between A New Hope and Donald Trump (though less crazy to connect Iron Man and Elon Musk). But it’s not so much about who these stories center. It’s about what these stories exclude: communities. 

We live in an era where the individual is all but powerless in the face of environmental collapse, corporate plunder, and rampant political corruption. But you know who’s not powerless? All of us, together.  As long as we think of ourselves as individuals, as the “heroes” of our own separate “journeys,” we will remain isolated from each other and incapable of collective action. 

The stories we tell each other, and how we talk about those stories, has a profound effect on our thinking. To that end, I believe it’s time we turn our attention away from the monomyth, and towards better myths – myths that acknowledge our collective power rather than deluding us about our individual strength. But where can we find examples of this new type of collectivist storytelling? Well, let’s go back to Star Wars…

Now, I don’t much care for Star Wars. I was too young to develop an emotional attachment to the original trilogy, but exactly the right age to be disappointed by the prequels. To their credit, most Star Wars fans I know have made no effort to “convert” me (something I sadly cannot say for most Star Trek fans I know), so when a number of my friends suggested that I watch Andor, knowing full well that I don’t give a fuck about space wizards, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

And yeah, Andor slaps. But the interesting part, at least to me, is why it slaps. The main-line Star Wars trilogies are each about a very special boy (or girl) who is so good at the force that the whole galaxy is like “whooooaaaaaaaa.” Andor, on the other hand, is about a guy who accidentally shoots somebody on the way home from the club. Except it’s not even actually about that guy. Yes, his name is the title, but there are some episodes where he basically isn’t on screen at all. That’s because Andor is not about a person. It’s about groups of people.

It’s about the fascist apparatus of the Empire which grinds into action when some pompous bureaucrat insists on filing Andor’s accidental murder through the proper channels. It’s about the coalition of rebels who take advantage of Andor’s fugitive status to enlist him in a sweet heist. It’s about the citizens of his home planet, under military occupation. Individuals within those groups have opportunities for heroism: making a speech that incites an oppressed populace to riot, for example. But none of these people are heroes all the time, and none of them are elevated above the groups they’re a part of. They’re regular people who, because of their connections to the people around them, have a fleeting opportunity to do something incredible, before that opportunity moves on to someone else.

It’s inspiring to watch. Empowering even. Unlike the Hero’s Journey, which makes me think “ah, man, wouldn’t it be nice if I were that cool and powerful?” stories like Andor make me think, “Oh man, I guess you don’t actually have to be that powerful to change shit.” It feels achievable. It points to where our strength truly lies.

These kinds of stories are all over the place, we just don’t think to categorize them that way because we’re too Campbell-pilled to notice. Dungeons and Dragons – and all of the actual play series that have contributed to its recent rise in popularity – is a hugely collaborative form of storytelling, where there can’t be a single hero because that wouldn’t be fair to all of the other humans at the table who also want to be heroes. These stories by their very nature focus on the developing relationships between the characters, rather than one character’s developing relationship with themselves.

But for my money, the genre which best exemplifies this structure is the noble heist film. Ocean’s Eleven, Money Heist, Leverage, and so many others focus not on the journey of a single individual, but on a group of like-minded people coming together to accomplish a shared goal. Yes, most heists include a mastermind who gets a bit more screen time, but the heists themselves, which take up the bulk of the film, are intensely collaborative and provide moments for each character’s unique skills to shine. The loot is often split evenly among the participants, or given to a member of the community in need. And when it’s not, it’s usually because someone tried to fuck over the rest of the group to get a bigger share. Either way, heists are about trust, accountability, and eating the rich. Fuck Joseph Campbell, this is the energy I’m bringing into 2024.

And guess what, knuckleheads? That show Andor I was talking about? It’s got a fucking heist in it. And you know what else? The Dungeons and Dragons movie is also a heist movie. If you put a community of like-minded people together, sooner or later they’re going to hatch an elaborate plan to steal a bunch of shit from a rich guy who deserves it. So yeah, maybe that’s why wealthy screenwriters are so intent on keeping Campbell on top, huh?

Don’t Not Write What You Don’t Know

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There are a lot of bullshit truisms that aspiring writers get taught. Some might even call them “myths,” WINK. One of the things I want to do on here is obstinately insist that the exact opposite of these truisms are true, because they are and fuck you.

So, “Write what you know.” Where to even start? Well, let’s start by clarifying what it means to “know” something in this context, because there are a few things it could mean:

  1. Things you learned through research. How cobra venom works, or how much stuff weighs on the moon, for example.
  2. Abstract emotional truths that connect us to all other humans — how bad it feels to get dumped, or how good it feels to shoot a snot rocket out of your nose in the shower.
  3. Stuff that literally happened to you, which you now feel compelled to tell me about it.

I’m fine with the first two. If you wanna learn stuff like a big goober, I’m not gonna stop you. But too many people hear the phrase “write what you know” and immediately think, “Hey! I know stuff! I should write about that stuff!” And no. Stop. Listen to me.

Here’s the problem: most of you are boring as hell. I mean, I’m extremely interesting, and even I have never been in a knife fight, a car chase, or even a spaceship. If what you are interested in writing is fiction, ie ridiculous long-form lies, then limiting yourself to writing about things that have happened to you does two things:

  1. It severely limits the kinds of stories you can tell
  2. It makes you think that everything that happens to you is just soooooo important

Let’s dive into each of these, shall we?

Thinking Small is for Wieners

One of the main things about writing is that it’s really, really hard. (At least it is for me. If it’s easy for you then eat shit I guess, I’m the one writing this post.) If you take a hard thing, and then you add even more barriers to doing it, it won’t be long until you’ve made that thing entirely impossible. If you tell yourself that you can’t write about something until it’s happened to you, that means there’s a lot of shit that you can’t write about. Have you ever negotiated a hostage situation? Pet a giraffe? Hell, statistically roughly half of you don’t even menstruate. By ruling out 99% of the stories you could possibly tell, you’re making it 99% harder to even start writing in the first place, let alone write something you’re excited enough about to keep going.

That said, it’s also really hard to write something if you don’t know where to start. So my advice is to use what you know as a starting point, and then extrapolate from that in order to write about what you actually want to write about.

One of my favorite writers is a sci-fi author named Samuel Delaney. Delaney has this book called Babel-17, and in this book there are a couple of enormous space battles, and the way he handles these space battles has taught me more about writing than pretty much anything else (except for one long-forgotten episode of Penn and Teller’s Fool Us, but that’s a story for another time).

The thing about the space battles in Babel-17 is that Babel-17 is not a book about space battles. It’s a book about how horny Samuel Delaney is for linguistics. He spent so much time researching words that he didn’t have time to learn about gravity propulsion technology or the doppler effect or whatever other hard sci fi bullshit all the other space opera boys can’t wait to tell you about. But he still wants the space battles to be exciting, because they’re fucking space battles. So what does he do? He hand-waves the whole problem away by talking about power tools. This is the commander of a pirate fleet setting up for a big conflict:

Tarik’s voice over the speaker: “Carpenters gather to face thirty-two degrees off galactic center. Hacksaws at the K-ward gate. Ripsaws make ready at the R-ward gate. Crosscut blades ready at T-ward gate… Power tools commence operations. Hand tools mark out for finishing work.”

Samuel Delaney, Babel-17

This spicy hot word salad gives me almost no idea what these ships look like, or what kind of weapons they have, or what their jobs are. That’s because Samuel Delaney doesn’t fucking care. What he cares about is that the pirate fleet is organized (like a collection of tools), dangerous (also like a collection of tools), and in space (like a collection of space tools.) Samuel Delaney knew more about tools than he did about space stuff (as do most of us!), so he used tools as a starting point to get us to understand the situation without having to know a whole lot about it.

“But Cory,” you’re probably thinking, “That’s science fiction. Writers have to extrapolate because nobody has experienced space battles!” And first of all, that kind of proves my point: do we really want a world where nobody writes about sweet space battles because nobody has experienced any? But second of all, this applies to real world shit too.

Take for example Lionel Shriver’s “We Need to Talk About Kevin,” which is a book about being the mother of a school shooter. School shootings are definitely real, as much as certain lobbyists like to pretend otherwise, but Lionel never experienced one, and she certainly wasn’t the mother of a school shooter. And yet, somehow, the book is really good! Shriver took a real-life tragedy, something all of us are aware of but very few have actually experienced, and she did the hard work of putting herself inside the mind of one of the central participants of the drama. She used what she knew about human nature to — get this — imagine what it would be like to be a different human person with different experiences. You can do that! It’s allowed!

I’m sure Lionel Shriver also did a lot of research into school shootings and their aftermath, too. I’m not saying you should write about somebody else’s traumatic experiences, or somebody else’s culture, without learning everything you can about those cultures and experiences first. But there are certain very important things no amount of research can teach you — namely, what it actually feels like to be a different person in a different situation.

You can do your due diligence to make sure you don’t get anything factually wrong, and you can try really hard not to step on a rake and say something offensive, but at a certain point you hit the end of your research and you have to take a risk. You have to bet it all on your powers of imagination. Sometimes it’ll suck — it won’t sound true, or even cool, and you’ll feel kind of embarrassed. But it’s either that, or remain forever trapped inside the confines of your own limited backstory. Which would be a shame, because…

Nobody Cares About Your Sad Dick

When I was in my late teens and early twenties, I had this idea that I needed to make my life as interesting as possible so that I would have something to write about. I traveled, and I did lots of drugs (sorry, mom), and one time I may or may not have tried to break into the post office, but no matter what weird shit I did, I was still a middle-class white kid doing things that I thought would make me interesting.

I never experienced racism, sexism, or homophobia. I was never a victim of abuse. I never worried about making rent. My parents loved me, and were shockingly nice to each other, too. And the fucked-up part is, as an aspiring writer, I felt like that was a bad thing. “How am I supposed to be a writer,” I thought to myself, “if I’ve never had anything dramatic happen to me? Truly, I am cursed by this privileged life.” Yeah, I know.

One useful aspect of this mindset was that when bad shit happened to me, I was able to put a positive spin on it. “This sucks,” I would think to myself, “but hey, the worse it sucks, the better it will be when I eventually write about it.” The problem, though, was that I ended up turning my life into a narrative, rather than, you know, a life. I found myself living in front of an audience, thinking about how I would word my description of an experience even as I was experiencing it. My suffering felt important, and real, and necessary. It was an exhausting way to live.

The thing about most of your experiences, even the ones that sucked, is that they’re way more important to you than they are to anybody else. Although your ability as a writer may make you able to convey common experiences in an entertaining and illuminating manner, events do not become more important simply by virtue of having happened to you, a writer. Some of your life experiences, properly told, might make great anecdotes, short stories, or performances at a storytelling event. But as far as supporting a whole book’s worth of words? I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it’s a lot more dubious. If I had a nickel for every random white guy who’s told me he’s working on a memoir, I’d have more money than all of them are ever going to make off of all those memoirs combined.

This is how you end up with Jonathan Franzen types endlessly writing books about mopey professors who desperately want to fuck their students. It’s how you end up with college sophomores writing about their mushroom trips like they’re the fucking moon landing (not fake version). It’s how you can convince yourself, if you’re not careful, that you’re the main character of reality, and that your experiences are somehow more real than everybody else’s.

I promise you, your experiences are not unique. And that’s good! It means you have something in common with pretty much anyone you might want to write about — a space pirate, Jonathan Franzen, the mother of a school shooter, etc. Writing is mosaic-making — rearranging fragments of the stuff in your head to make a pretty picture. Regurgitating exactly what’s happened to you is like making a mosaic out of one big rock you found at the beach. Take the stuff in your head and crush it up, recombine it, mix it with stuff you got from other people. The smaller you make the pieces, the smoother you can make the curves; the more realistic you can make your final image.

So don’t write what you know. Write with what you know, and hopefully, by the end, you’ll know something new.