OCEntertainment

I'm "Adam Lanza" But I Didn't Kill Anyone

Sun, 16 Dec 2012 16:47:12 -0500

Sensationalist headline out of the way? Good. Now that we’ve moved past that, I’d like to start with a clarification: I’m not Adam Lanza. That person is deceased. I’m also not someone named Adam Lanza that just happened to be associated accidentally. My name is Eric Ravenscraft. I’ve discussed it here before, but I have some form of mental disorder. I’d like to tell you what, but the diagnosis never stayed the same. The last one was Asperger’s, but that’s not even in the book anymore. So I don’t know what I have.

I’m not the only one, though. This article, titled “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother” describes a child that could easily have been me. When I was younger, I was violent. Difficult to control. I scared my family. I was in and out of therapists offices, on a variety of medications and had all manner of bizarre tests done on me. I ended up in youth detention centers and mental institutions on multiple occasions each. I know what it’s like to wear an orange jumpsuit and have my shoelaces taken. I’ve been restrained and held for observation overnight. I’ve had electrodes glued to my head and been in and out of MRI tubes like they were tanning beds. If you were to compare the stories about what Adam Lanza was like to my life, you might be hard pressed to tell the difference.

I’ve never killed anyone. And I would never.

After Friday’s horrific incident, where a severely disturbed young man entered an elementary school and murdered over two dozen people, many of whom were only children, the discussion on mental health services started immediately. “Gun control won’t solve the problem if we don’t deal with the lack of proper mental health services in this country!” Dear god, yes. Please. Let this happen. You have no idea how very true it is that we need this. The system is woefully underfunded. Schools for special needs children are an after thought. The medical system is even worse. As of right now, state-funded institutions are being dismantled in favor of outpatient care in my home state of Georgia. Similar endeavors are being explored or actively pursued elsewhere in the country. And worst of all, reform comes slowly.

When I was younger and would have an outburst, my schools were authorized to carry me to what were called “Quiet Rooms.” As you might expect, these were not nearly as nice as they sounded. Picture a padded room without the padding, just bare concrete walls, sometimes not much larger than a closet. In one school I attended, the doors were sealed with electromagnetic locks that could not be opened except by the press of a button outside or a fire alarm. These rooms are no longer legal in my state. In 2004 a student killed himself in a room like this. A speedy six years later, a ban was placed on so-called “seclusion rooms.” Six years.

So, yes. Mental healthcare reform is something that is desperately needed.

However, this has always been the case. It’s nothing new. As any doctor or psychology student could tell you, the entire system is difficult to navigate, can be insanely expensive, and ultimately will fail to help a number of patients who will then be turned loose, left to their own devices. This isn’t something that has suddenly gotten worse very recently. This is a problem as old as modern psychology itself.

So, when the discussion comes up that we need reform because of a mass murderer, I get worried. Genuinely glad the conversation happens, but very, very scared. Because, you see, as I read descriptions of Adam Lanza, I see a master class in creative storytelling that manages to create new stigmas out of old ones. “He was a loner. A huge nerd. Probably a genius. Hung out with the goths.” This is all pretty typical amateur, armchair profiling that news organizations and idle speculators like to do. But a new element is being added to the mix. “He may have had some form of autism.” The beauty of this, from a narrative standpoint, is that autism provides us with a center. “What do all the people in this class of brilliant, asocial gunmen have in common? Well, it’s probably that durn autism!” It’s an easy way out. It provides us with both an explanation and the possibility of a solution. If there is a tangible underlying cause that makes people lack the empathy required to not kill children, then we can stop it right?

Except the problem isn’t that simple. And when you present it that way, you take a terrible risk. The autism spectrum is not an inherently violent disorder. Even among disorders that are (such as Intermittent Explosive Disorver, which is defined in part by extreme anger), assuming that the ultimate goal of treatment is to avoid a mass shooting will necessarily color the treatment and interactions with the patient. They’re a time bomb. The only goal here is to prevent them from causing harm.

You can’t see it like that. They’re people. They don’t seriously want to kill people. Not most of them. In a majority of cases, in fact, they just don’t know how to handle themselves. This is why they’re described as having “special needs” and not “needing to be put down.”

I read stories like the one I linked to at the beginning of this article and, as horrified as I am by what this kid did (even moreso because I know I’ve been no better), I feel sympathy. I know how it feels. It’s like an exposed nerve. The feeling is inescapable. Inasmuch as clinical depression feels like a weight of sadness and despair that can’t be overcome, so too do these emotional outbursts feel more amplified than they really are. Someone on the autism spectrum may have a tendency to get fixated on a certain thing or subject because these are their few comforts. Take it away and they lack the perspective to know it’s not the end of the world. Any child will pout when they can’t get their way. With the right mental condition, though, it can feel like unbearable. It feels like physical pain.

My experience is not the same as everyone else’s. In fact, that’s the point. That just because one person who may or may not have had a place on the autism spectrum did something horrible doesn’t mean that all of them would. Mental illness isn’t something that breaks a person. It doesn’t make them somehow less of a person. It’s a thing you adjust to. You learn how to deal with it and, with the right support, go on to live a very fulfilling life.

Nearly two years ago, I wrote a piece on here about how I’ve adjusted since my early days in the mental health system. I talked about how my experiences will always be different and I can’t change that. I wrote that I’d even grown to be a fully functioning adult just fine. Something that I’ve learned since then that doctors did not expect I would be able to do.

In the time since I wrote that piece, my life has changed dramatically. I’m currently employed by multiple websites as a writer on a variety of topics. I make 100% of my income online in a career that I simply decided to take on. I haven’t been to a therapists office in years. I do not take medications anymore, aside from a bit of St. John’s Wort sometimes. I didn’t go to college for writing, nor do I have any official training in journalism. I was educated as a video editor and somewhere along the way I decided I wanted to write. So I did. At the time I wrote the last piece, I was astonished and thrilled that I’d been given the opportunity to write a few guest posts for Lifehacker that received over 100,000 views combined. Today, between the sites I write for, my articles have easily seen over a million views total. This is a series of changes that, according to the diagnoses I’ve received over the years, should not be possible. I’m resistant to change. It makes me uncomfortable. Someone with my conditions should lash out at the prospect of such severe change (and I’ve certainly shown that this is the case for me in the past), and yet here I am. I’ve had a year of intense change and I make it through. Recovery and adjustment is possible.

I have friends. I’ve had lovers. I enjoy movies and games and long conversations with other people. Sometimes I stay home and play violent video games, other times I go watch Shakespeare plays. I have not physically harmed a person (outside of playful rough housing) in years. I still sometimes get more emotional than I should, but I get by. I’m capable of taking responsibility for my actions and, in general, ensuring that I don’t have the same kind of outbursts I used to have that could ruin my life.

I hate to describe it this way because I feel a default sense of self-consciousness when I say good things about myself, but the truth is I’m a success case. I’ve done well. My father has told me before that my life is like I’ve started a race with a backpack full of rocks strapped to me. It’s true. I was screwed up from the start. But I’ve also been pretty blessed to find people that didn’t give up on me. People who gave me chances I didn’t deserve. People who didn’t compare me to mass murderers and wish I’d never been born.

The conversation is going to go forward and there’s nothing I can do to stop that. I only hope, for the sake of both the victims of these shootings and the people that we might prevent from doing the shooting in the future, that we don’t characterize mental illness, particularly the autism spectrum of disorders, as the cause of violent crimes. They need help adjusting. They need to find their center, just like the rest of us.

And for anyone who knows or is related to someone with a difficult-to-handle disorder…I promise, it gets better. It really does. It doesn’t always have to be the way it is now. For every tragedy there is also a success story. There are happy endings everywhere. Look for those. Strive for those. Don’t give up. We can and will do better than this.

I Would Much Rather Make Fun Of Your Politics Than Argue With You About Them

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 04:52:52 -0400

If you know me personally, then you probably have an idea of how I lean politically. If you know me well, you should also know that I find the idea of leaning a certain direction politically is stupid and I will make fun of you for it. If you know me really well, you know that I’ll make fun of your ideas even if they aren’t stupid.

This is something that very few people understand about me. And I find it hilarious. I think I’m an arrogant asshole, because honestly, I am always laughing on the inside when people are cheesed* that I “misunderstood them.” I didn’t misunderstand you. It’s just fun to make jokes. I like jokes. Jokes are the best.

Do you know who doesn’t like jokes? Uptight people. People who think that their cause is “no laughing matter.” Here’s the thing: this is never true. This isn’t my opinion, or how I choose to live my life, it’s just how the world works: to someone, somewhere, your cause is hilarious. In fact, probably to a whole lot of people. There’s seven billion people on the planet. Chances are, if I could break down the language barrier and bend the space time continuum so I could explain your Super Important Cause to everyone on the planet, I could fill several auditoriums worth of people who find your cause to be ridiculous.

Sometimes, that’s because people are awful. Other times, it’s because they just can’t relate to you. Or sometimes—and this one is crazy I know, but bear with me—they might disagree with you. :O

That last one is the most fun, I think. When people get offended because someone doesn’t take their belief as seriously as they do. It is fantastic that you have the deeply held belief that women should have access to affordable birth control because you know someone who had some problem some time and it was awful and if we can prevent this kind of thing we should and blah blah blah. I’m still going to make jokes about it.

It’s not even that I don’t care. I do! A lot, in fact! Hell, I don’t even come down against the idea of providing affordable healthcare to women that includes birth control. In fact, I believe that the idea of saying “It’s not my responsibility” is a selfish mentality no matter the context when it comes to helping your fellow citizens and that if we really want to grow into a mature society, we need to acknowledge that we won’t be able to isolate ourselves from everyone we disagree with, but should still support each other and oh GOD I’M ALREADY BORED.

These conversations have a place. I’m even willing to have them with you. And you will occasionally see me drop the act and be frank and honest with you. I change the way I talk when I do that so you should be able to tell. But most of the time, honestly? I’d rather just make jokes. It’s more fun and, oddly, you get people to open up more when you laugh with them.

This is the thing that gets me about politics. Everyone is eager to take a side and hold a position and have a value and fight the good fight. Let me paraphrase that sentence: Everyone is eager to fight. Political races, and by extension the moral debates we have over and over and over again, become wars. Not to everyone, of course. In fact there are a lot of you that can have delightful conversations about your beliefs. But the ones who speak the loudest are also the ones most eager for a fight. And I have a problem with that. Here’s what it is:

I like you too much to want to fight you.

There are exceptions, of course, but for the most part, I actually like people. I think people are dumb. I think they do idiotic things and are jerks, and in groups they’re especially awful, and there are some that I just relate to so little that I can’t stand to be around them. But deep down beneath my sarcastic, crusty exterior that desperately needs a shave, I like people. When I get to have conversations with people where I get to know them, and I mean really get to know them, I become thoroughly intrigued.

This makes it so much easier to have a conversation with people, though. If you genuinely like people, and want to relate to them no matter what they believe or like or do, and if you want to make them laugh even if they disagree with you, it’s so much easier to have a real conversation with them. Hell, you might even persuade them over to your side! But don’t have conversations with people just for that purpose. That’s a douchey thing to do.

There are enough people in the world who fight the good fight. I’m happy for them and encourage them to keep doing what they have the passion and the drive to do. I am thrilled to see people like that do the things they do. But when you couple passion to do good things with the compulsive need to be right and beat the other guy, I just can’t stand to talk to you anymore. Which is fine for me. If I can’t stand talking to you, I’m going to do exactly what I do if I enjoy talking to you: make jokes.

Most people, though? They’re going to argue with you. They’re going to get defensive and start a debate and things will get heated and no one will walk away better and eventually it escalates to the point that the cable news networks are attaching your story to exploding intro graphics. Which, by the way, is also silly.

It’s unproductive, exhausting, furthers the divide between us, and most importantly, it’s boring. I don’t know about you, but I’m able to have much better conversations with people when I’m able to laugh with them. Laughter makes people comfortable. Comfort breeds familiarity and familiarity leads to sympathy. I’ve been sympathetic to a lot of people on a lot of issues and, frankly, I can see how all the major things we debate about are too complex to fight over. It takes people working together to solve problems. Not people fighting against each other.

I’m not saying I don’t want to talk politics with you. Or have a moral debate with you. Or discuss how to fix big problems we all face with you. I’m just saying that if we’re having those talks, and especially if you decide you just want to share your beliefs at me, don’t be surprised if I make jokes. It’s only because I think fighting with you about it is stupid.

* I’m also laughing on the inside whenever I say “cheesed.” That is such a funny word to me.

I'm An Angry, Fat German/Italian American, And Whatever Costume You Want Is OK

Wed, 26 Oct 2011 19:26:41 -0400

Can we have a talk, adults? I’d like to. If that’s cool. I might piss you off. If I do, I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, I love you to death…but I’m going to laugh at you. I’m going to laugh my ass off at you if what we talk about is going to piss you off. Because people who get angry over silly things is funny.

In the category of silly things to get upset over, here’s a great entry: Halloween costumes that parody racial stereotypes.

In case you haven’t heard (and CNN didn’t even hear until today, so don’t feel bad), Ohio University students have begun a campaign of social awareness called “We’re A Culture, Not A Costume.” The campaign calls into focus offensive costumes such as an Asian girl holding up a photo of a a geisha, a Mexican holding up a photo of a dude dressed in a giant sombrero riding an ass, and a white dude gleefully dressed as a crappy parody of an Arab with a bomb strapped to his chest.

Alright. That last one is decidedly offensive.

However, beyond that, the connection between “racial stereotype” and “offensive” continues to elude me. Perhaps it’s because I always thought that Augustus Gloop and Super Mario were hilarious, or maybe it’s because I’m a white male living in America, but I’m sorry. I can’t exactly find myself getting pissed off because someone dressed as a geisha.

Here’s a bit of oversimplified history, for those of you who are even more white and uneducated than me. Geisha originally grew out of prostitution. Yep. Sucks. However, geisha also grew, in some instances, into skilled dancers and artists. Geisha can just as easily refer to (and in the case of a costume, be) a skilled artist as much as a prostitute. Furthermore, even if the intent of a geisha costume was to represent Japanese prostitutes….there’s sluttier things that happen on Halloween.

Geisha are real. In the same way that ballerinas and strippers are also real. Offensive? Maybe to some, depending on how you feel about open sexuality. But racist? I’m having a hard time with that.

But hey. Let’s say it is. I am not Japanese, nor am I very familiar with Japanese culture. It is entirely possible that, in a way that I’m unaware, even mentioning geisha (or any of the other caricatures presented in the article) are inherently offensive at the mere mention. Similar to how I feel about any mention of Tea Partiers. Ok. Cool.

It’s a fucking Halloween costume.

Again, the Arab bomber man? Offensive. That’s goofy-ing up murder. Not only that, but it’s murder that’s the result of religious extremism. Which is even worse, because that pisses off both the people who don’t believe in god and are furious that someone would kill in the name of god, as well as those who do and believe that their god or gods are loving and are furious that violence is being used in the name of their god. Oh yeah, and it’s kinda fucking creepy. Generally, really accurate costumes look cool. A really accurate costume of a dude with a bomb strapped to his chest looks like a dude with a bomb strapped to his chest. Not something to walk into a party with.

But. The others. Not so much. Especially that geisha, but that one just gets to me on principle. On the issue of racial stereotypes in general, though, stereotypes exist. They do! Sorry. And more often than not, they come from something real. It’s important to note, as with all things, that just because a stereotype exists does not mean that every person belonging to a particular race belongs to it. However, perhaps it’s just me, but I’m of the opinion that making light of a stereotype does not inherently imply that you believe such a thing of an entire race. And frankly, I wouldn’t survive if I did.

“Oh sure, Eric. You’ve experienced racism. You’re a white guy living in America. In the south, no less. You have it so hard.”

Well, for starters, thanks for your sarcasm. You know I’m a fan. Second: no. I don’t know what it’s like to be judged on the color of my skin. That must suck. I can’t even begin to understand. I do, however, know what it’s like to be judged by an arbitrary stamp of “mentally disabled”. And “nerd”. And “creepy”.

I don’t know what it is about my face, but it’s not something people are drawn to. Whatever it is, I don’t know, but ok. Fair enough. Some people aren’t attractive. Next up, when people start to have conversations with me, it becomes increasingly apparent that I’m a nerd. I like comic book movies, Star Wars, Android, Twitter, Lord of the Rings, the internet, and all manner of other geekly things. That’s strike two.

Then, if they ever find out that I have mental disorders, for whatever definition of “disorder” we’re choosing this week, that’s strike three. I cannot begin to tell you how many times my thoughts, opinions, or behavior have been written off because “Well, you have Asperger’s. You wouldn’t understand.” It’s frustrating.

You want me to say I don’t understand racism, truly know what it’s like to suffer from prejudice, well hell yeah. I’ll be happy to tell you that. But I’m no stranger to being judged by superficial labels and stereotypes, and to be made fun of for things that are not central to my character.

Which brings me to one of the funniest things in the world: The Big Bang Theory.

I love this show. It’s pretty fucking hilarious. It’s a show about these four nerds, three of which may or may not have varying levels of mental neurosis that make socialization difficult if not impossible, and…well, it’s just hilarious.

Let me make this clear: this is a five-season show that is built on the premise that guys like me are awkward, don’t get the girl, fumble through social conventions, and are all around weird. And possibly even too mentally unstable to trust.

We’re a culture. And our culture thinks this show is fucking hilarious.

I would dress as Sheldon for Halloween. I would laugh at a well put-together “nerd” costume. I would also laugh if someone showed up to a party where lederhosen, or dressed as a fat Italian with a big black mustache. It’s funny. I am not any of these things. They are not central to who I am. I am also comfortable enough in who I am to accept that these stereotypes exist, and came from somewhere, and sometimes caricatures are funny.

I’m also not so cynical as to think that everyone who dares to acknowledge a stereotype must be an ignorant racist. Coming from a cynical guy like me living in the South, that’s saying something.

World Of Warcraft Deserves All The Mocking It's Ever Gotten

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 02:10:51 -0400

Confession: I started playing World of Warcraft about three months ago. Despite my affinity for gadgets and tech, my unyielding devotion to superhero movies, and my knowledge of video editing and conversion processes, I didn’t do it because I’m a huge nerd. Ok, maybe a little because I’m a huge nerd. No, a friend invited me to play. A friend in real-life. Oh, and this friend is a girl. That’s right. A real, living breathing person, that I knew prior to this, and who is not secretly a 56-year-old fat man.

Really, the stage was perfectly set for me to believe that the stereotypes were untrue.

I’d heard the jokes before. I knew the stereotypes. You don’t play the game unless you’re the nerdiest of the nerd. A step above LARPers and furries. It sucks your life away. You’ll spend way too much time wasting your life. It’s pointless. It’s dumb. Blah blah blah. But you know what? I thought, why not? Why not give it a shot.

It’s been three months. I’ve leveled a character to 85, the current level cap for the uninitiated, and I’ve experienced most of what the game has to offer. And you know what?

This game deserves all the crap it’s gotten.

Now. This isn’t to say I never had any fun playing it. Or that I won’t play it again. Certainly that’s not the case. There were some fun parts. And I’ll probably play it again at some point. I mean, I don’t want all that work to go to waste.

And that’s why I’ve come to dislike this game on principle. It’s work. It’s a lot of work. It is an insane amount of work. Worse than that, though, the culture of the community is impenetrable.

When I first got started with this game, I was referred to a number of sites. wowwiki.com, wowhead.com, and later, askmrrobot.com. In the time that I have played this game, I have found that every single one of these, as well as a few others on occasion, have been absolutely indispensable. It is a testament to the great work done by those sites, but it speaks incredibly poorly of the game itself.

This game is complex. It is not a light game. It is not something you pick up to play in your spare time. It is an investment. It’s a lifestyle.

One of the first things you’ll notice early on in the game, is that when you get to a capital city, you’ll immediately enter a few IRC-style chat rooms, the main one being the Trade channel. Using the phrase “IRC-style” should already be a bad sign for user-friendliness, but let’s move past that. It’s instant messaging, you can get the hang of that, right? Well, here’s a sample of some of the things you might see in this trade chat:

“WTS valor bracers, 5k”
“LFM FL 10 man”
“[Enchanting] LFW bring mats”
“Mage 4.2k resil LF 2v2”

In the world of World of Warcraft, those are complete sentences. They express ideas, are understood, and conversations happen with them. I know! Hard to believe!

The first hurdle to getting into this game—and I certainly tried!—is simply being unable to communicate sometimes with people. Not because concepts are difficult to explain, mind you. This guy is looking for some more people to join his raid, one guy who does enchanting work is volunteering his services, and a particularly skilled mage wants to play a little two-on-two games with some other folk. These are easy concepts. But the language used is impossible to get through.

“But Eric, that’s a public chat. You can’t expect them to dumb it down just for you.”

True. It’s perfectly reasonable for a group of people I’m not interacting with to speak in their native tongue. That’s cool.

Which is why I was utterly flabbergasted when, during a dungeon, a stranger addressed me with the following, complete sentence:

“table”

No, seriously.

I need to stress that, when this occurred, I had been playing the game for a solid two months. I was familiar with my character and new how to work it, but I had never before had someone say “table” to me and expect me to know what it meant. It turns out, he was asking me to cast a spell, called Ritual of Refreshment, that would create food the group could share, with various health and magic benefits. He wanted me to cast this spell so we could all have food. He did this by saying “table”.

I was called a noob for not immediately diving his meaning.

“Oh, but Eric. That’s just the terminology they use. You haven’t learned it yet! You can’t be mad because you don’t know how people do things!”

Actually, I can. Largely because the “way things are done” are entirely inconsistent. For my character, there’s a spell that can be cast that turns one enemy into an animal temporarily, so that you can deal with other enemies first. This is a tactic known as crowd control. During my time playing dungeons (which, by the way, is done by pairing you up with four random players from across the server), I have been asked to perform this action with the, again, complete sentences: “cc”, “poly”, “sheep” and, in some situations, the use of nothing more than a symbol placed above an enemy’s head. That symbol, by the way, is a crescent moon. Crescent moon means sheep in this game.

If the communication in the game, though, were the only frustrating aspect of it, I might be willing to concede that I simply need to give it time. Nevermind that it’s taken three months to even get to where I’m at now, and nevermind that I’ve spent less time playing through entire series of games than I have just researching this one. I’d be willing to accept it.

However, the culture of the game seems to be one of the least newb-friendly cultures of anything I’ve ever seen on the internet. And yes, I’m even including /b/, famed for inventing the word “newfag” to describe anyone who hasn’t been around for years.

Most of my interactions with veteran players, both within the game and without, came with a lot of pressure. “You need to reach level cap.” “You need to increase your item level.” “You need to raise your DPS.” “You need to read strategy guides so you can learn how to play your class.” The enjoyable parts of the game, like exploration, character customization, and learning all of your new capabilities, became watered down in an endless struggle of quests, and experience points, and item upgrades, and a general weary feeling that, no matter how much better I got at the game, I still wasn’t good enough to even be considered not a noob anymore.

Now, I understand not liking noobs. I’ve played games online before, and sometimes people who are new and don’t know what they’re doing are just frustrating. As an example, I’ve played games in TF2, where I’ve been on teams with five engineers who all build nothing but teleporters, with both the entrances and exits right next to each other, and serving no useful purpose. This is confusing to teammates, causes problems for legitimate engineers, and is generally annoying.

However, in World of Warcraft, it’s not so simple. When I reached level 80, I began the new content that came with the most recent expansion. As I tried to continue my questing alone, I discovered that the single-player, or solo-able, sections of the game seemed to be too difficult for me. I asked around as to what the problem I was facing might be, and I got a variety of answers. “Your gear is too low level.” “You need to try different quests.” “PVP moar” and the always-helpful “you suck”.

Ultimately, I tried to get in some player-versus-player games. Battlegrounds. A bunch of folks get lined up and spilled on to a battlefield where they fight each other. Your team may be anywhere from 10 to 25 people or more. During one of these games, during the pregame, in fact. I was told, by someone I had never met, didn’t know, and hadn’t talked to at all, that I should not be queuing if I’m “lvl 80 with pre-cata gear”.

Now. I can take this one of two ways. I can either take it as a helpful suggestion that I am out of my league (a fact I will discover soon when I am killed quickly during the battle), or, I can take it as a symptom of the larger problem I have with this game: virtually everyone doesn’t want to have anything to do with you until you’re an expert.

This is the problem I have with this game. It’s not that it’s complicated. It’s not even that it requires work! If that were the case, I would never have made it to level 85. It’s that no matter how much work is done, you’re still “just a n00b”. I have played for three months, done over 50 dungeons, gotten the top-tier gear in all but three of my slots, gone mining, bought gems, bought enchantments, made trades, grind rep, and God knows what else…and yet, even now, if I’m wandering in an area where some enemy players are, I will still suddenly find myself stuck, unable to move, as an invisible enemy slices me up eighteen ways from Sunday, then laughs at my corpse. And for those who have played this game, the most recent example of that wasn’t even from a rogue. It was from a druid. I suspect this is because I’ve spent a lot of my time on PVE gear, but I could survive that attack if I had PVP gear. Silly n00b.

I could go on. Really, I could. The game is so immersive (which is both a good and bad thing) that it requires a regular commitment. The game even rations out daily quests, weekly rewards, and weekly caps on how many of certain types of points you can get. It literally gives you a schedule for you to follow to keep you going, but also to hold you back.

However, at this point, I’m over it. My ultimate goal in this game, if I had one at all, was to finally get to a point where I could join a raid, which is a ten-or-more person level. Yet, after all this time, all this work, and all the continued embarrassment at still being not good enough, despite how much I’ve learned and practiced, I’ve run out of energy to care.

Oh, and I feel like it’s worth noting, all of this work comes after a recent patch which, I’m told, made things a lot easier for new people. What takes days now would’ve taken weeks last year, or so it’s been said.

If that’s true, thanks….but no thanks. If you need me, I’ll be playing Starcraft II, Portal 2, or Team Fortress 2.

….I promise they’re just all good games. I don’t have a thing for games with “2” in them.

Ashton Kutcher, Sex Trafficking, And The Importance Of Real Data

Wed, 29 Jun 2011 16:23:37 -0400

If you’ve read much of the crap I’ve written, you probably know by now that I’m a stickler for accurate information. It’s a pretty precious commodity these days. Which is why this article from Village Voice was so refreshing. Go read it right now. I guarantee it’s more important than anything I’m going to say here.

The piece discusses an oft-quoted statistic discussing underage prostitution in America which states that there are somewhere between 100,000 and 300,000 underage sex slaves in the United States today. A number which happens to be, it turns out, totally false. To sum up, the study the number comes from a bit more accurately discusses children who are “at risk” of becoming child prostitutes. Children who are “at risk” include runaways, 77% of whom are returned home safely within a week, female gang members, and kids who live near Mexican or Canadian borders. Suffice to say, those numbers are more than a bit inflated.

I couldn’t help while reading the piece, however, that inaccurate numbers, in this case, wouldn’t bother me necessarily. Not by themselves. It’s not like I’m suddenly ok with a nine year old girl being forced to give oral sex to strangers as long as there’s only a few hundred of them. One or one million, it’s heart breaking and wrong. In my experience however, inaccurate data almost always leads to unhelpful conclusions and inefficient solutions. So, I kept reading, waiting for the part where they bring it home. If you’re going through the article and wondering when they’ll get around to it, the answer is pages 4 and 5. But seriously read the whole thing.

The piece starts to bring it around by pointing out that stats like the 100k-300k number start by bringing attention and funding to issues like pornography that begin to run afoul of first amendment issues. Now, to be clear, if it came down to choosing between the existence of porn and the safety of underage girls (and boys), I’m choosing the safety of children every time. I am an American male, and no more sexually inert than the next guy, but I would never consider my own sexual gratification more important than the safety of another. That being said, the argument about whether or not pornography encourages child prostitution is a tenuous one at best and at worst, a distraction from the real issue.

What’s the real issue? That we have spent hundreds of millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to fight both pornography and child prostitution. This encompasses 45 different Justice Department task forces, 18 of which confirmed they’ve identified 248 children involved in sex trafficking over a period of time spanning January 2008 to June 2010. According to the information shared by Village Voice, the federal government was successful in identifying only 8 children a month over two and a half years.

But that’s not the worst of it, according to Village Voice.

While there’s quite a bit of money that goes towards prosecuting child prostitution, very little is done to actually help the victims of sex trafficking. According to Village Voice, Seattle has a facility devoted to aiding the victims of underage prostitution. This facility receives zero federal funding. There is currently legislation making its way through Congress that would provide federal funding to some rehabilitation facilities. It is the first of its kind to exist since the now-famous 100k-300k statistic was first published.

Is this one study to blame for misguided attempts to fix the problem? No. Of course not. However, it’s yet another example of improper or inaccurate information being used to sensationalize things that are already sensational and encourage rash action.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that most of the information I’m writing about here was taken directly from Village Voice. While I did a bit of Googling, it would take time I simply don’t have to research every single point. And that’s kind of the problem, isn’t it? We can’t all independently confirm every piece of information out there. We depend on research organizations to provide us with accurate information, and we depend on our politicians and charitable organization leadership to come up with proper and effective solutions to the problems we face.

Intellectual honesty is not an easy trait to come by. It’s a trait that requires you to ask “in spite of how I feel about this, is this true?” For example, while reading the Village Voice piece, I came across a section describing “transgender children”. This is a concept I was previously unfamiliar with and the reactions immediately started flowing: “Who’s letting kids get sex change operations?!”, “Why are people confusing kids more during puberty by indulging the idea that they were born the wrong gender?”, and “Wait, what the f-…?!”

Intellectual honesty is that principle that must allow yourself to ask, even in spite of what you may consider unquestionable assumptions, “Is this the truth?” Is it really true that pornography leads to child prostitution? Is it really true that more funding and larger task forces will reduce the number of children being abused in the U.S.? Is it really true that prosecution is more important than rehabilitation?

I’m not a guy that has all the answers. I don’t even really think I’m supposed to. But some folks, it’s their job to have the answers. Whether those answers are right or not. But I say this, without irony or sarcasm, with all the sincerity and compassion I can muster: please, everyone, for the sake of the children, stop using bullshit statistics to support your cause. Be honest with yourself if you really want to make a difference.

New York Is Now A Breeding Ground For Godless, Rampant Homosexuality, And I'm Totally Happy For Them

Sat, 25 Jun 2011 01:14:43 -0400

Now that I have your attention, let’s talk.

To start with, I’d like to give you a bit of background into where I’m coming from. A lot times, when I get into conversations with people about controversial topics, most folks have a tendency to say things like “Everyone I know believes x” and “I’ve never met anyone who really believed y.” I’m not one of those folks, though. I’ve met people from so many wildly diverse and contradicting viewpoints and backgrounds that I can’t honestly say that there’s not someout out there who believes [insert crazy idea here]. If you can think it, it’s someone’s obsession in life.

Perhaps that’s why I gave up caring about whether homosexuality is okay or not.

When most of the folks I knew were church folks, I found my morals came more easily. For some reason. I found it easier to believe that something was true when I didn’t know anyone it personally affected, or even someone who completely disagreed with me. Then I started to meet those people and questions came up that I couldn’t answer.

To be clear, and this will probably come as a shock to half of the people I know (and the

For example, sure, I could point out the verses in the Bible where it says that homosexuality is a perversion of God’s design and unnatural. I could also point out the verses that says a woman should not be allowed to teach or even speak in church. Why is one a disruption of the natural order, but the other is simply a cultural difference? Truthfully, I don’t know.

Ironically, the best explanation I could ever come up with for why homosexual practices shouldn’t be encouraged came not from the Bible, but from simply science and logic. Same-sex couples cannot have children. From an evolutionary standpoint (if you subscribe to this idea), the more couples there are not having children, the fewer humans there are to carry on the race. Granted, we’re pretty overpopulated as is, so perhaps some cutbacks are necessary, however long-term, large-scale, it’s untenable. Think of it this way: if homosexualswere the majority and heterosexuals were the minority, in the same proportions we have now but reversed, we would face radical drop-offs in the population, possibly reaching a point where we were unable to continue creating enough humans to sustain our ways of living.

Now, I should point out, the above paragraph is complete bollocks (that kind of majority/minority flip is virtually impossible if we’re subscribing to the very same overly-simplistic evolutionary logic used in that same idea), but that’s besides the point. The point is, from a simple logic perspective, a fundamental (and flawed) understanding of science provides the best real-world explanation for why homosexuality should not be encouraged, while a theological response really only provides a theological answer.

And that’s kind of a problem.

This is where it gets tough. Given where I came from, my default position was to try to denounce homosexuality. I was never really vocal about it, but that’s where the internal monologue went. But I just couldn’t. I couldn’t find a way to legitimately say “No, we can’t allow this!” in the same way that I could say we couldn’t allow murder, theft, or the stifling of freedom. If two people of the same gender decided they wanted to live together and love together, there’s not really any argument against it that doesn’t sound untenable at best and silly at worst.

Now, okay. By this point, I’ve said a lot of stupid things. Folks who land on the “God says not to” side will certainly think that I’ve disregarded God’s opinion on the matter entirely. Folks who land on the “people should be free to love whoever they choose” side of the aisle think I’m retarded for even trying to imply that homosexuality is “evolutionarily untenable”. What does that even mean?! It’s the confused musings of someone who up until this point really had no idea what to think and was pulled in multiple directions by close friends on both sides with wildly different viewpoints.

I think a lot of the mess has been cleared up for me now. And I think gay marriage should be legal.

There’s a lot of factors that contribute to this and I’d like to go through them. First off, I need to clarify, I am a Christian. That probably comes as a shock to roughly half of my friends and acuiantances, but it’s true (the other half who aren’t surprised I’d say that likely think I went heretic a long time ago, but that’s neither here nor there). As such, I do believe that God’s opinion matters. However, I do not believe in a theocracy. And, simply put, a government that is dictated by the laws of your God is a theocracy.

In the Old Testament, the people of Israel, despite having been saved and redeemed by their God time and again, demanded a king be set up for themselves like all the other nations. This demonstrates not just a stupidity on the part of an ancient people, but more specifically, an unwillingness to be ruled by God. If there’s one thing I’ve learned about God, it’s that He’s not willing to impose Himself on the unwilling. No matter the circumstances, no matter the cost, no matter the penalty, it seems the one thing He absolutely will not do is force the unwilling to obey or to love. He will assert his authority and dominion where it is necessary, and He will never let it be forgotten that this world belongs to Him. However, love does not come from a coerced position. His people demanded government by another. And we’re no different. We champion the constitution as our saving grace for government, not the Bible. Even among churches, this is the case. It is simply impossible to argue that because God says it, it must be law.

“But Eric. God says not to murder, and we have laws against that!”

I’m pretty sure that families of murder victims also say not to murder. That’s a pretty easy one to pin down. Not to mention, most laws we have center around offenses that are at an obvious cost to others. Theft, deception, violence…these all have obvious consequences where one causes harm to another’s life.

Furthermore, ask most Christians, and they’ll tell you that divorce is not really high on God’s List of Cool Things. Yet divorce is perfectly legal. In fact, it occurs in the church quite a bit. This is because sometimes, in real life, bad things happen. If we’re concerned about the divine, uncorrupted plan of God, I have some bad news for you: it’s already broken. It’s in the process of being made whole, this is true, but in the mean time, bad stuff still happens. Sometimes people get stuck in awful situations and it sucks and there’s no good way out of it, and sometimes the process towards healing means bleeding first.

There’s really one thing that makes me more reluctant than anything to come down against gay marriage: I just don’t really know many gay people that closely. And, frankly, I have a really hard time telling people I don’t know that something they’re doing is wrong, when I can’t really pin down who it’s hurting, besides my sensibilities of what God, a god they may not worship, know, or care a lick about, thinks. I found it difficult to continue to pretend that I had my finger on God’s pulse all the time, that I knew what it was God wanted at all times. It’s difficult, frankly, to say that my answer to big moral questions is “I don’t know”. But, for me, it’s more honest.

I don’t want to meet someone and decide I know them before I talk to them. And I don’t really want to decide that someone is doing evil things before I’ve learned that person’s name. I want to get to know everyone. I want to treat people with respect and dignity. I suck at this a lot of times, but it’s what I’d like to be. And I don’t want to judge people harshly because somebody told me, years before I met them, that their lifestyle, a lifestyle that they say makes them happy, was evil.

1 Corinthians 5:9-13 is the best write up on this I can find. The short version is that the commands and the requirements of God have no real effect on those outside the church. That is to say, if you don’t really care about God, or if you don’t believe in God, then there’s really no room for anyone to tell you to obey God. Just like if I quit my job, I have no further requirement to obey my boss. He can still, if he chose, try to be involved in my life, but only so far as I allow him to be. Beyond that, there is no room to call for obedience. And those who are inside the church, those who believe in and are concerned with the thoughts of Almighty God, they have a way to discuss the matter. It’s difficult to have a relationship with anyone and not once consider how the way you live your life will affect your relationship with that person. That applies to human relationships and it applies to divine ones as well. And if that’s the case, if there is a gay person who believe in and wants to love that God they believe in, who am I to bring in any unwanted opinion? Sure, challenging your friends is a natural and requisite part of community and relationships, but that still implies a level of familiarity. Telling strangers on the street, or worse, legislating against people I’ve never met actually puts up walls between me and them, not unite us.

If this note sounds like an absolute mess, it’s because my thoughts on the subject are just as messy. And I’m not even really sure what I think. I’ve known some folks who are gay and delightful people. As I said before, I’ve never been terribly close, as in trust-you-with-my-secrets close, but frankly I’d like to. I’d like to get to know and learn about and be friends with all manner of people! I don’t want to exclude anyone. Can I promise that I’d never say “Hey, you need to not do that!” to a homosexual? No, I can’t. Then again, I’ve said the same thing to straight people. I’ve told straight people who want to be in relationships to chill out because, for whatever reason, it was damaging to them at the time. I can’t say the situation would never come up. People are complicated. Sometimes solutions to problems are weird.

But one thing I can say is that I don’t intend to ever tell anyone that they can or can’t do something that doesn’t tangibly harm another human being, unless I’ve gotten to know them, become friends with them, and discussed a situation with them intimately. I’ve been the listening friend to a lot of people. I’m known to a lot of these people as being very opinionated when I think they’re wrong. But I don’t tend to get to that point without asking a lot of questions first. And, frankly, I have a lot to learn when it comes to homosexuality. And I want to learn. I don’t want to shut anyone out. And it is far from my place to judge, condemn, or invalidate the choices and beliefs of people I’ve never met.

I’m not sure if that makes me a bigot, a homophobe, a heretic, or a lunatic. But it is what it is. Forgive my incoherence.

And New York: congratulations on winning one for freedom and equality. This is a good day.

Basically, I Saw Dismembered Human Body Parts On The Internet And I'm Freaked, OK?

Tue, 29 Mar 2011 13:30:06 -0400

I feel like I should have some kind of catchy title. Something that will add legitimacy to what I’m saying. Something that won’t make it sound like I’m just another guy who wants to be pro something or anti something else. Truth is, I’m none of those things. I’m not an activist, I’m not legitimate, and I’m not catchy. I’m just kinda freaked, ok?

Today I clicked on a link that one of my Facebook friends posted. I don’t know her too well. We’ve hung out a few times, I’ve been to her house, she’s been to mine. We’re cool and all. I’ve got closer friends, but she’s alright. Anyways, I click on this link. It’s something about war. Along with the link is this caption: “Next time you want to claim you’re ‘pro’ whatever war, remember that this is what your war really is.” I can learn a few things from this statement. One: I can tell what her opinions of war are. Two: I can gather that whatever I’m about to see is ugly. Three: whatever the link is, it’s going to be something that’s going to piss people off. And the reasons it will do so will vary widely.

I click it.

It’s actually not too bad at first. There’s not a horrible picture on the front of the page. Perhaps I’ve been to too many dark corners of the internet, but I half-expected to be bombarded with some gruesomely deformed image right off the bat. I wasn’t. It was two guys in combat fatigues sitting around, chilling out. One guy is gleefully holding up his gun. It looks like any number of photos I’ve seen of friends of mine after any given air soft gun battle, or maybe laser tag. The guns typically look cooler in those photos, but the message is basically the same: “We’re average folks and we have fun shooting stuff.” Not too many people I know intimately are in the military, but still in the back of my mind, there’s that visceral connection. That “sup, bro. Let’s go chill,” thing.

Smiling people make me feel comfortable.

So I start skimming the article. Not reading it. Just skimming. The military is not something I’m terribly interested in, and I’ve heard the stories before. I’d be lying—no, worse than lying, I’d be grandstanding, showing off—if I said that anything I could read would be new or shocking to me. I’m in my mid-twenties and somehow I’ve heard it all. Sure, I might not have seen certain specific horrible acts in detail, but after all the photos and stories to come out of places like Guantanamo Bay for literally years upon years, should anything shock me?

Here’s the truth: Americans will beat, torture, starve, and humiliate other human beings. Our enemies are not a unique people in this regard.

It’s not news. In fact, it’s bordering on trite. Pretending I’m shocked by it is disingenuous. Do I hate this fact? Of course. Does it disgust me when I see it? As much as, if not more, than any other disgusting thing. Am I shocked? No. No I’m not. I’m a practical guy. If I know what the truth is, I don’t dick around pretending like it’s something it isn’t. America has a lot of good qualities about it. There’s an awful lot of people here I like and relate to. Some people here will cut off another man’s finger and use it as a trophy, given the opportunity and blessings of his peers. These are facts. They’re not surprises anymore.

So I clicked on the images. There were 18 of them. The first was a big black warning with white text in a serif font. Serif fonts are harder to read on a screen. It informed me that the images that followed are “EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND DISTURBING”. I hesitated for only a second. There was a time when I would’ve been bothered by seeing mutilated or tortured human bodies. Movies have taken care of that. Thanks Quentin Tarantino and Zack Snyder! I clicked next.

The next thing I saw was a human body face down on the ground, with a puddle of congealed red goo beside him.

He looked young.

My eyes wouldn’t look directly at his face at first. Or, more specifically, at the area I expected his face to be. As I said, he was face down, and the picture doesn’t really show the extent of the damage. “The extent of the damage” is a phrase I probably picked up from watching House. Feels doctor-y anyways. Shoot, today’s Tuesday, is there a new episode? I clicked next.

Now I can see his face. It’s brutal. Not the worst I’ve seen. It’s pretty bad. He’s bleeding a lot. He’s clearly not alive as they’re taking photos. His family, wherever they are, may not have heard that he had died when this picture was taken. They may not be alive. I wonder if he had a girlfriend. Do people in Afghanistan have girlfriends? I’m a little rusty on regional romantic societal structures. And I also know I frequently get it wrong. I don’t want to be ignorant about these things, but it’s also a little outside the realm of necessary information for me. I click next.

There’s a picture of a soldier smiling as he holds the dead boy’s head up off the ground.

He doesn’t seem all that bloody in this picture. Maybe he’s been a bit cleaned up. Maybe the blood has just dried. Whatever the case, he doesn’t look too terribly bad. Aside from being dead. But if you told me that a kid who looked like this was just in a four-wheeling accident, would be in the hospital for a few weeks, but would eventually make a full recovery, I’d believe you. He’s dead. His blood is on the sand.

It’s about this point that my ctrl-tab reflex kicks in. I rarely stay on one tab for too long. I’ve got TweetDeck open. One girl is talking about her hair. She says she might go blonde. I almost make a joke, but I can’t come up with a good one. There’s three new links from the Huffington Post. I need to unfollow them, they just constantly spam my feed. A new tweet from Kaley Cuoco. She’s in the Big Bang Theory. I thought following her would be more interesting, but she mostly just talks about dogs and girly stuff.

Back to the article. I click next.

I go through the rest of the photos. There’s a lot that are more gruesome than the first ones I saw. One of a person who’s torso was so badly damaged by, apparently, a rocket, that it’s hardly distinguishable from a pile of seaweed and fabric. There’s a few generic photos with various captions explaining other atrocities not depicted.

One of the last photos is of a severed human head, sitting atop some rocks. Someone off camera in combat fatigues appears to be hitting it with a large stick (or at least pretending to). He’s wearing combat fatigues. Combat fatigues like the ones in the first photo. The one at the beginning of the article. The one that made me think of air soft and laser tag.

I don’t know what to think.

It’s fucked up to look at this. It’s even more fucked up that seeing it almost seems normal. It’s horrifying. It’s disgusting. You can actually see bits of human flesh falling off the head. I tab over to Facebook, the same place I found this link, and see photos of my smiling friends. Someone made a joke about redheads not being able to tan. Haha! Back to the photo. How can someone do this? What sick kind of joy does one get from beating a dead man’s head with a stick? Where’s his family? Is anyone looking for the man who’s head is sitting on these rocks? Will they ever know what happened? Are they alive?

Shouldn’t I be throwing up right now? This is sick. It’s disgusting. Distraction. I need a distraction. What’s going on Engadget? Maybe there’s some new story I can make fun of. I like doing that, and I’ve been slacking off since last week. I’m not gonna go anywhere as a writer unless I write something. His head looked almost cartoonish. It didn’t seem real. I know it is. But it didn’t look like a head. It looked deflated. Oh god.

Back to Twitter. I’ve tweeted about it by this point. “So. I’ve seen a severed human head being bludgeoned by U.S. soldiers today. Thanks internet.” That’s what I said. Like it’s the internet’s fault. But that’s the joke, right? There has to be a joke. Otherwise, I’m just a guy sitting in an office looking at photos of a human head sitting on a rock, getting beaten by soldiers, then checking Facebook and Twitter.

I don’t know how to handle it. I want to get outraged. There’s no one to yell at. I don’t know this guy. I don’t know his superiors. I don’t know their superiors. I don’t know anyone in any branch of the military that could do anything. It’s not exactly military protocol to do stuff like this, so there’s no change in policy I can advocate for. The story is out, and I’m sure someone with more influence than me is going to call for these people to be punished, provided there’s enough backlash. As an internet guy, I’ve done my part to ensure that happens by passing the story along. What else is there to do?

I’ve had my stint with being a rage-fueled, anti-establishment internet protester. It made me hateful. I suppose I could join up with my friends who protest stuff. They’re good people. In fact, the girl who linked me to this in the first place is one of them. She’s a great person. Our mutual friends are great people. If there were anything I could do as a guy without a real voice that matters on the world stage, they could tell me what to do. But I don’t have the energy for it. I don’t have the passion for politics. And that’s how it always ends up. Endless politics. Some people have the energy for that. I support them fully. I have one friend in particular that simply can’t stop doing stuff for the causes she believes in. I help her when she needs me. But I’m not her. So what do I do?

Distractions. More distractions. Pretend every day that the world’s not going to shit. Help the people I can help and ignore the ones I can’t. I can send money to Japan or Haiti or any other number of relief efforts. I can’t change governments. I can talk to a buddy who needs relationship advice, or a friend who needs comfort. I can’t eradicate the lonely and dissatisfied mindset that gives a place to sites like AshleyMadison. I can’t fix despair. Or anger. Or depression. I can barely manage these things in my own life.

I shared the link on Twitter. I have 139 followers. I’m guessing a large number of them are spambots. Two people replied to the article. Many others continued discussing other things. I don’t blame you guys. I don’t want to see this either. That’s not true. I wanted to see it. I clicked it, didn’t I? I’m not a slave to my curiosity. Years of being on the internet taught me the self-discipline I need to not click on something if I suspect it’s going to be something I don’t want to see. I chose to see this. I just don’t want it to exist.

And I’m helpless to stop it.

I shouldn’t say things like that. Not here in the U.S., where everything is possible. Where unbelievable dreams come true. Heck, I’ve seen the impossible happen. I’ve heard of untold thousands of people coming together to provide for the hungry, to take care of the sick. To bring hope to people who have none. I’ve seen the weak come together and find they are strong. I’ve seen the most irreconcilable differences be put aside in favor of pursuing something greater than the pain of loss. I know it can be done. I know that we’re capable of amazing things.

I want it to be enough. I want it to be better. I don’t want to live in a world where this kind of brutality is accepted. I don’t want to live in a world where it’s even considered. I want it to be shocking. It’s not. It’s horrible. It’s atrocious. But it’s not shocking. It’s not even mildly surprising. It’s mundane. It’s all too common.

A smarter person would end this with something you can do. I’m not that guy. I’m a guy who makes jokes about gadgets and movies online. I don’t matter to most of the people on the planet. Maybe I matter to you. I’m not even sure who you are. I’m not sure anyone’s still reading.

I just don’t want stuff like this to happen.

Hey Jezebel: Fuck You (Or: All Sexism Is Bad)

Tue, 08 Mar 2011 23:15:00 -0500

I don’t really like going into the world of Jezebel. In fact, I’m only aware of it because it’s part of Gawker Media as a whole and I’ve spent a considerable amount of time on Gizmodo and Lifehacker in the last two years which are also part of Gawker Media. But suffice to say, the few times I’ve gone to the site, I’ve walked away with an astonishingly bad taste in my mouth.

To start with, let me explain about a little about myself. I’m a nerdy guy. I was never all that sociable in high school. As I recently revealed, that wasn’t even really much of an option. I’m not exactly sure where the idea came from, but somehow along the way, I picked up this crazy notion that girls should be respected. It wasn’t from church, as I never even knowingly entered a church until I was 18. And it certainly wasn’t from the people at my school. In fact, I recall one particular incident in high school where I watched one particular douchebag rubbing one of my female friends in the crotch area under the table during class. I don’t remember much about the incident, only that he was staring at me as he did it, almost showing off. The incident angered me. She laughed. Later she informed me that she laughed because, when she’s uncomfortable, she doesn’t know what else to do. I wish I’d had the good sense then to start a fight with the guy. She was my friend. I hated seeing her disrespected like that. That memory sticks with me to this day.

Suffice to say, I’ve spent a great deal of effort trying to cultivate an attitude of respecting and valuing the women in my life. So, when I hear or read angry anti-male rants that look to portray us all as horn dogs and insensitive cock monkeys, I get more than a little pissed. I’m expected to go the extra mile to see the individual value of women (and gladly do so), but because I’m male, my opinion and values—values that include ensuring women get respect!—are irrelevant, because how could I understand? Still, I get it. More often than not, the women I meet that so fiercely cling to these beliefs have been hurt. Badly. Although, that’s an unfair correlation, we’ve all been hurt. We’ve all been neglected and left alone and insulted and disregarded and we all deserve to be valued.

Which is why when I see stuff like this, I get mad. Furious. Fuming. I want to punch something. Hard. Repeatedly.

Of course, I feel this way for two reasons. Chief among them is because this email, this horrific, gut-wrenching, slimy piece of filth exists. Classifying vaginas? Horrible. Ranking girls? Degrading. And then there’s selections like this:

“Non-consent and rape are two different things. There is a fine line, so make sure not to cross it.”

If this email were a person, we’d be brawling on the floor right now. I’d likely be getting my face smashed in, but it would feel good for the chance to punch the guy who wrote it at least once.

But there’s another reason that it pisses me off. Because I’ve read this before. Where one person goes to great lengths to categorize and dismiss an entire other gender. Where one individual reduces the act of sex and relationships to a self-serving, pseudo-scientific piece of crap for the sake of humor, ego-stroking, or whatever other sick pleasure the person is trying to conjure up. Except, the other time I saw this, it was written by a woman.

Since I don’t really expect you to go to great lengths to read through two lengthy articles about the depravity of human sexual selfishness, allow me to summarize: A female student of Duke university created a detailed presentation describing the pros and cons of 13 separate men with whom she had slept, giving them scores, even ranking their penis size.

Surely, Jezebel, the site that deems the hypothetical application of a degrading and insulting composium on the subject of female objectification would hate this. I mean, look what they had to say about the frat boys’ email:

“Once again an idiotic college student has brought shame on his fraternity, his school, and possibly the entire Greek system by doing something that confirms every misogynistic frat guy stereotype.”

and

“The email covers disgusting frat guy cliches — racism, degrading women, and promoting sexual assault — so thoroughly that it almost seems like a parody, but it appears to be real.”

So, what did they have to say about this lady person’s objectification, degradation, and personal, individual humiliation of 13 Duke University students that even included pictures?

“Here’s another reminder that women can be as flip, aggressive, or acquisitive about sex as men can. And there’s nothing wrong with that, as long as all parties are consenting.”

and

“Some of it is downright hilarious”

Jezebel. Listen. I appreciate what you’re trying to do. But holy crap are you ever screwing it up. I mean, for crying out loud…how in the world is an email that admittedly horribly degrades unnamed girls is bad, but a powerpoint presentation that chronicles the sexual exploits of 13 individual students with names and pictures is only wrong because it’s in writing? Would it be ok for the frat boy to continue his attempts to bone as many chicks as he can so long as he gets them to say “ok I’ll do it” first and never writes about it? Of course not!

It’s wrong because it’s wrong. It’s wrong because it’s disrespectful. Because every single friggin’ person on this friggin’ planet is worth something. Men and women alike!

Are either of these two people right? No. They’re both unbelievably wrong. In the worst ways. They’re insensitive, callous douches who have treated members of the opposite sex as little more than objects that exist for their own gratification. And that’s not how it works.

I’m disappointed that people like this frat boy and this Duke girl exist. Not just disappointed, but angry, furious. Outright disgusted. But Jezebel, people listen to you. You have loyal readers. As a member of the public spotlight, you could effect change in the public mind’s eye. And instead of promoting mutual respect and admiration, you’re merely conjuring up hate for the other side.

As a man, I’ll go ahead and apologize on behalf of my kin. It won’t make anything better, but I really am deeply and truly sorry for how some men have callously and heartlessly pursued little more than your vaginas and left you emotionally empty at the end of it all. And I’m sorry I didn’t punch that guy in high school in the face when I had the chance.

However, we’re not all bad. And failing to condemn with equal vigor the actions of girls like this Duke university student and the USC frat guy only continues to encourage inequality. Maybe you’re ok with that. Maybe you’d rather be dominant than equal. Maybe you think it’s high time than men be made to cook and clean while the women go off to war. I don’t know. But that’s the not the world I wanna see.

I want to do household chores, I want the woman I’m with to have a job, and I want to tell her how much I value her every day and delight in seeing her face. And shit like this makes it damn hard for guys like me to want to put in the effort.

I’m just glad I know that not all girls are like that.

I had no intention of posting this

Sun, 27 Feb 2011 05:03:54 -0500

I wrote this to myself. I didn’t really intend to post it publicly. But I am.

*****************

Let me tell you a little about where I came from. Because you don’t know. If you tried to guess, from what you know about me, you would still guess wrong.

I come from Doctor’s offices. Psychologists to be precise. My school was a special ed school. My place, in any social circle, was off to the side. They tell you at a party to loosen up. To get out there and dance. To be sociable. This runs directly counterintuitive to the way I grew up. In middle school, I had my own special class. Before I moved up to high school, I got not just my own class, but my own school. An entire building, set of teachers, bus schedule, everything.

Why? I couldn’t really tell you. Not even if I tried. Oh, it was the right decision. There’s no doubt about that. But the reason could be any number of things and the accuracy of any given guess would be as verifiable as speculation about what the president’s sexual habits are.

I was told I had OCD. I was also told I had Tourette’s Syndrome. And Asperger’s. Heck, I was even diagnosed with epilepsy at one point. If you wonder why I distrust professional psychologists, this is why. I had a team of doctors. A team. And none could agree on what was wrong with me. In fact, the only thing they did agree on was that *something* was wrong.

And that’s where I grew up: something’s wrong with you. Or maybe right. But whatever it was, it was certainly different. Not normal. Not average. Alien. Unlike the rest. An anomaly. The exception to the rules.

Of course, being the exception doesn’t mean you can’t live a decent life, right? Well that’s true to a degree. I have friends. I have a job. That’s good, right?

I’ve had a drink occasionally. I’ve been to a night club. I’ve stayed out til sunrise. I’ve eaten food that was overpriced, unhealthy, and paid for it with money I’ve budgeted myself.

But none of these things have I ever done through your eyes. The first time I got drunk, I was analyzing the experience the entire time. Out loud. I informed my friends of my state of inebriation as I discovered it for myself.

It was a purely intellectual exercise. And that was, perhaps, what was so baffling about it. I didn’t care, even after twelve shots of vodka, to relax and enjoy the ride. To lay back and feel, instead of trying to understand.

Most of my experiences have been centered around this principle. Trying to understand. To understand the world I was ostracized from.

I hate how I sound like one of those “You just don’t understand me” kind of whiners that think no one else ever had an uncle die. And I apologize if that’s how it sounds. I don’t mean to. But frankly, it’s difficult to believe I’m normal and just like everyone else and plenty of other people see things the way I do and such when the systems set up to raise our young have been saying precisely the opposite for so long.

Today is Saturday. February 26th, 2011. I currently live in a town house that I rent on my own. I pay my own bills. I organize social events. I do everything a healthy adult should do. And what is perhaps the coup de grace of my accomplishments so far, yesterday, three articles in wrote were published on a site called Lifehacker. The three of those articles saw over 100,000 views collectively within 36 hours. By rights, someone like me, someone who comes from where I come from, shouldn’t be the kind speaking to 100,000 people in any capacity, much less one that *doesn’t* involve how I handle my disorders.

I don’t regret any of it. I’m proud of where I’ve gotten to. I’ve managed to take control of my life, become my own man, and even have what looks like it could be a promising future.

But that hole left by not just never having a normal life, but choosing not to, that chasm between how I view every normal rite of passage and pleasure and how you experience them….nothing I do can change that.

The Verizon iPhone Will Not Affect Android One Bit

Fri, 14 Jan 2011 18:38:57 -0500

I had the G1. I was following Android when it had zero percent marketshare. At the time I wasn’t even into gadget news. I want to say it was roughly 2008 that I first started reading blogs and following trends and what not. And even back then…the iPhone was in charge. I was following along as Android sprouted new models like the MyTouch 3G and the Hero and it floundered a bit. In October 2009, after being on the market for a year, the Android platform had 2.8% of the market. A full 5% less than, no not the iPhone. Not Blackberry. Not Windows Mobile. Palm. Palm had almost three times as many phones on the market as Android did. Meanwhile, the iPhone had a hair shy of a quarter of the market. Of the 42.7 million handsets on the market, the iPhone was in one out of every four hands.

Then the Droid came out.

Then the Nexus One. Then the Evo. Then the Droid X. And the Incredible. And the G2. And the Droid 2. And…the list goes on and on. Though, the Droid is what really set it off. From that point on, and I want to emphasize this…the iPhone has not gained any significant portion of the U.S. smartphone marketshare. The overall market has increased (to the tune of almost 20 million new users across all platforms in fact!), however the percentage of that group that own iPhones remains the same: one in four. Only now? There’s also an Android in one-out-of-four hands, too.

One year is what that took. To give you an idea of what that looks like, take a look at this. This is comScore’s numbers from November 2009 (the month the original Droid was released) to November 2010. Different analysis firms will give you different pictures. However, the one thing that is impossible to ignore, no matter which perspective you look at these numbers from, is this: Android has exploded. Not just “wow, they’re selling a bunch of phones”. Not just “hey, this is pretty cool, because, you know, now normal people are talking about them”. This is unbelievable growth. And don’t let the fact that there’s now an equal number of iPhones and Android devices fool you. This growth took, effectively, a single year to accomplish. Compare with the iPhone which, in November of 2009, had been out for nearly two and a half years. When the iPhone had only been out for a year, Apple’s marketshare was far, far below one-in-four. In fact, few even considered it a major contender.

This is important to note fore a few reasons. Perhaps chief among them is that Android has experienced explosive, exponential growth that’s showing no sign of slowing, not because of the iPhone, but rather in spite of it. Keep in mind, when the iPhone entered the market, the kings of the hill were Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices on the corporate side and RAZRs on the consumer side. The iPhone was an oasis in a desert of mobile phone innovation. The Droid was introduced into a climate where everyone knew at least someone with an iPhone, and Apple’s App Market was thriving, popularity had never been higher, and the bar had been raised absurdly high. This market was not going to be any cake walk. This was going to be an uphill battle for a long time. And it has been. Still is. And yet, Android’s growth has not stopped. Android has taken an average of an additional 2% of the market every month for at least the last half year.

If I sound like I’m a little biased towards Android, you’re probably right. But the numbers don’t lie.

Is it possible that the Verizon iPhone will stunt Android’s growth? ….I suppose that could happen. But the likelihood is slim.

For starters, there’s two types of people who are eagerly anticipating a Verizon iPhone. There’s AT&T customers who love their iPhone and hate their service, and there’s Verizon customers who love their service and hate their phone. That last group can be divided into those who have Android phones and those who have other phones.

The first group? The current iPhone users? They are no small percentage. According to one poll, it may be as many as a quarter of all iPhone owners (and 16 percent of AT&T users as a whole). These millions of users? They will not affect Android marketshare one bit. No new iPhones being introduced to the market means, not just that Apple doesn’t gain any marketshare, but that they will actually lose marketshare if they don’t sell iPhone to other consumers as well. Remember, the market as a whole is growing. The iPhone needs to sell one handset to a new consumer for every Android device sold to stay even. And with 300,000 Android devices activated daily, that’s an awful lot to keep up with. Especially if a huge portion of the devices being activated on your biggest launch since your product first came into being are current customers that don’t shift the scales.

As for the other groups, those on Verizon who have been waiting for the iPhone, it’s possible that there’s quite a few Android users who will jump ship once they have an iPhone available. However, the sheer volume of Android devices seems to imply that, unless there is a sudden, abrupt flatlining of Android sales, there’s more than enough Android devices being activated to keep Android in the lead. Again. 300k devices per day. 2% marketshare every month. A trend which has not stopped now that Android is even with the iPhone in terms of userbase, by the way.

But surely this, the legendary iPhone for Verizon, will change things!

There’s actually a very serious flaw with this thinking. Because you see….we’ve heard this before.

Prior to the iPhone 4’s release, there were many people, including various influential tech industry commentators, who insisted that the rapid rise in Android’s growth, which had been increasing since October 2009, was largely due to the fact that the iPhone was reaching the end of its update cycle. The 3G S had been out nearly a year. Surely many iPhone users were simply waiting for the next device to come out, right? And, in fact, since Gizmodo had gotten their hands on the legendary device and spilled its guts out wide on the internet for all to see, there was a level of anticipation that had not and will not ever be repeated: folks knew what was coming. This was perhaps the one time in all of history that an iPhone was approaching release and folks already knew nearly every detail about it and could make an informed decision to wait it out.

And yet…nothing changed. The iPhone marketshare did not increase. They sold units. Enough to stay in the exact same one-in-four position they always had been. But Android continued to explode. And it hasn’t stopped. At the time of the iPhone 4 release, numbers were announced indicating that Android was activating 200,000 units per day. This peeved off Mr. Jobs just a bit so, at the infamous “Antennagate” conference, he mentioned that they activated 230,000 iOS devices per day. Except, this number includes iPod Touches and iPads. The actual number of just phones was closer to 137,000 per day. That is, Steve announced they’d sold 3 million iPhone 4s in 22 days (3m / 22 = ~137k).

So, ultimately, even though the new iPhone release is the biggest sales period of the year for Apple, the iPhone still failed to move nearly as many units as Android did per day at the time. In fact, Android moved enough units, even during the iPhone 4 release, to not only hold back the iPhone’s marketshare growth, but to gain (you guessed it) 2% of the market over the iPhone that month. And the next. And the next. And so on.

And here’s the clincher. The thing that really makes it hard to believe that the Verizon iPhone will suddenly be some huge shift in the mobile platform war:

It’s the same phone.

This is not a new iPhone. This is a new carrier. If there were a huge amount of people who wanted this phone, this platform, it’s already been available. For months in fact! This is not news to those who wanted an iPhone 4. This is not a paradigm shift for those who wanted an iPhone 4. This is news for those who, very specifically, wanted an iPhone and want the Verizon network. Which could be anyone from Verizon customers with Droids, to AT&T customers unhappy with their service, to the folks who walk in to pick a phone with no knowledge and grab the first shiny thing they see that now have a new option.

However, this is not Android’s chance to finally prove itself in a grudge match with the iPhone. No. That has long since passed. It would take a hugely cynical person to believe that Android is selling on Verizon because people really want an iPhone, but are just taking whatever they can get in the meantime, and yet, is selling in numbers far, not slightly, far exceeding those that the actual iPhone is enjoying on a daily basis. There is, like it or not, a legitimate reason why Android devices are selling.

A valid point may be, though, that if the iPhone is available on Verizon, that’s a whole new set of 95 million subscribers that have their shot at getting it. Hypotheticals about what types of people those are aside, it’s hard to ignore doubling your potential market as a factor. However, there’s a flipside to this as well. And it occurred at AT&T’s CES event.

For the longest time, AT&T has had an almost malevolent approach to Android handsets. While there have been a few available, namely the Aria and the Backflip, the only true headliner to grace AT&T’s userbase is the Captivate. And, importantly, this phone is incredibly similar in nearly all ways to the other Galaxy S phones released for every major carrier in the U.S.. Yes, the cream of the Android crop that you could get on AT&T was a phone that you didn’t have to switch carriers for. Unless you were on Verizon, ironically, as their version, the Fascinate, was stripped of nearly everything that made it good. Including Google. There has been, for all intents and purposes, no legitimate draw for Android users to head to AT&T. And even more importantly, of the 92 million AT&T subscribers, the iPhone has been the obvious choice for a long time. It’s not been impossible to get an Android device on AT&T, but it has certainly been lackluster choices for the 92 million AT&T users who don’t want to switch carriers just for a phone.

Until now.

AT&T launched at CES not one but three high-end 4G handsets running the Android platform. And they are all beasts. Capable of pulling down speeds in the area of 14.4Mbps over their HSPA+ network. Devices from HTC and Motorola who have, thus far, been a.) leading the pack of high-end Android devices on other carriers, and b.) severely lacking an impressive presence on AT&T.

In short, Verizon is not the only one about to get a ton of new customers looking for a hot new device. The attention will not be nearly so focused on a single device but it will, nonetheless, exist.

The iPhone has a mythical quality attached to it quite often. And for good reason, to be honest. It is a fantastic device. I am quite happy with and prefer my Evo to my friend’s iPhone 4. I love my widgets, built-in Navigation, and notification shade. However, when I use my friend’s iPhone 4 it is hard to ignore that it is rather nice-looking. And I’m still jealous of his Netflix app.

But ultimately, we’re roughly equals. There’s some things I can do his can’t and there’s some things that his can do that mine can’t (though that gap is closing quickly). However, the market has, in fact, spoken. Android is here to stay. It’s not the Poor Man’s iPhone. It’s not “just for geeks and nerds”. It is in, in most measurable ways, equal to the iPhone. Especially in the area of marketshare. And that’s only going to keep growing.

Haikuliteration

Sat, 20 Nov 2010 13:03:01 -0500

Retrospect rhythm / Release remembered romance / Revering rapport

My Evo Is The First Phone I've Loved

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 10:45:52 -0500

I have a decent-length history with cellphones. I’m old enough that when I was a teenager, teenagers having cellphones was not common yet did occur. I was also not one of them. I’m old enough that, when I finally did get a cell phone after graduating high school, the phone did not have a camera in it. It was a Samsung phone. It was silver. That phone was horrible, but it did what it was supposed to do. I never texted with it.

After a while I upgraded to another dumbphone. Another Samsung. This one was red, but with a big black stripe down the middle. It was probably the first phone I liked. It had a camera. 1 megapixel or something. It was centered in the hinge and could rotate to face away or towards the holder. It was technically able to play MP3s, but it had one of those tiny headphone jacks so I couldn’t use real headphones. It kinda sucked. It had buttons on the front though and you could kinda listen if you played it over speaker and put it to your ear. One time I used it to play a song for my then-girlfriend. She didn’t really enjoy the song, nor the tinny-sounding speaker it was coming through, so we turned it off.

Somewhere around the time my contract was up on that phone, Android was coming out. And by Android, I mean the G1. The first Android phone. I’d been following along and frankly I loved the ideas Android proposed. True cloud-based sync. Unified data notification. Extensibility in virtually every area (apps, carriers, hardware design). I decided I wanted to be in from the beginning. I left Verizon and my cheap Samsung dumbphone and got the G1 on T-Mobile. Handset upgrade, network downgrade. I was taken aback with how much I could do with the G1, in the same way that someone who’s never had candy before is taken aback by candy corn. I suppose, technically, yes, it’s much better than what I’d previously had, but that didn’t change the fact that it wasn’t as great as it could be. Also, fact: candy corn is more disgusting than calamari deep-fried in goat’s blood.

I suppose I can say I loved my G1. I mean, I did. I was sad to see it go. I even tried to make sure someone would keep using it, which is more than I could say for my old dumbphones. But I never felt coequal with my G1. I loved it like a victim of domestic abuse. I would shower praise on it, and it would repay the favor by lagging when I tried to show it off to one of my iPhone-owning friends. I would lovingly download apps, and it would get slower and slower, even forcing me to uninstall some of them because it had such a low storage capacity. I loved it because I chose to, despite the crap it gave me.

Then, this year, I got my Evo. If the G1 abused me, the Evo showered me with love. I do still have to treat it well, though that’s to be expected. After my initial install rush of 100+ apps, there was an at least slightly noticeable lag. But my Evo still shows me love. It let’s me take up as much of that oh-so-comfortable 4.3” screen with my fingers as I desire. It lets me fiddle with the kickstand without ever breaking. It never ceases to have some new app available. Oh, and it’s always so diligent to stay on top of the most current releases. When I was hoping for Froyo, it was the first phone, besides the Nexus One to get any. And my Evo shared it all with me.

I rely on my Evo every day for texts, calls, chats. I blog with it. I read news with it. I read books with it. Facebook. YouTube. All of my music, both my subscription to ThumbPlay and my local music in doubleTwist, it manages all of it. I cover my homescreens with widgets, some I don’t even need, and it never slows down or gets tired.

I suppose occasionally, it does need a rest. It regularly asks me for a battery recharge in the middle of the day. But you know what? I don’t expect a Hummer to get good gas mileage. And for all that this phone does for me, it’s the least I can do to give it a USB charging cable to use while I’m at work. No biggie, Evo. You take what you need.

In fact, I’ll even give you your own little dock in my car. You’re always playing my music for me, so why not have your own special place while we go driving. What’s that? You’ll go ahead and give me directions with Google Navigation while you’re up here? *sigh* Evo. You are just too good to me.

How Facebook Won (Yes, Won) The Social Network Wars

Fri, 12 Nov 2010 23:26:34 -0500

Diaspora, champion of open source and privacy, is set to finally lay down the alpha release of their new social networking software soon. And rumor has it Diaspora looks pretty familiar. Unfortunately, as cool as the idea sounds (your data will stay private! Peer-to-peer something or other!), it may be coming too little too late.

It almost became the mantra of social-networking sites: “Another one will come along before too long.” From LiveJournal to Xanga to MySpace…they all did pretty much the same thing. Yet Facebook now has over 500 million users. 1 in every 14 people on the planet uses Facebook. One. in. Fourteen. For comparison, that is almost 200 million more than the entire U.S. population. It’s more than half of the entire population of Europe. And it’s only growing. Facebook is on the web, it’s on smartphones. You can update your status, get messages, and poke people from anywhere you can send a text message.

And it’s not stopping.

So, what separates Facebook from all of the others? What is it, exactly, that makes Facebook so prevalent? How has Facebook somehow managed to outlast all of the other social networking sites?

Uniformity

There is no denying, Facebook looks nice. We all hate it when Facebook revamps the website (and then does so again, and then again, oh and hey look, another time a few months later), but ultimately, Facebook has never strayed from their themes of easy-on-the-eyes blues over a pure white background. Facebook never allowed users to theme their site. If you ever saw MySpace, you can appreciate this. Heck, even Twitter, which really only lets you use a custom background image, can look pretty terrible with the wrong image. MySpace, with the ability to edit the look of almost anything, resulted in profiles trashier than a run-down Georgian trailer park. Usability takes a hit when users can’t find the friggin’ “Send this user a message” button.

I’m not generally one for the “the user shouldn’t be able to customize things” approach, but this is one where Facebook was right. My desktop is mine and I’m the only one that needs to use it. A public profile, however, may be a nice place to express yourself, but everyone else has to use it too.

Exclusivity (At Least At First)

It’s the classic reverse psychology. Tell someone they can’t have something and that just makes them want it all the more. Everything from clubs to expensive cars/houses to the beautiful girl that’s out of your league. Originally Facebook was only available to students at Harvard. This had the benefit of being both exclusive, and only available to some of the most well-connected students in the country. They then expanded to other Ivy League colleges. Then they opened it up to high schoolers. Then to everyone. This progression shouldn’t be missed, because it was that very strategy that made Facebook more powerful than MySpace or LiveJournal ever could’ve been.

Every site has an identity. That identity is determined partly by the site itself and partly by the users. Facebook began by capitalizing on the group most likely to adapt something new and cool: students. Young people. Like hipster fashions and STDs, cool sites get passed around more frequently and more widely by young people than the older generations.

That gets you your foundation.

In software, ubiquity is king. Just ask Microsoft. It is so easy to duplicate, reinstall, or convert software, platforms, and sites in the digital age that the only way to survive, the only way to stay relevant, is to be everywhere. Who remembers geocities? Or Alta Vista. I used to use a search engine called HotBot. Remember them? Of course not. Because HotBot never achieved ubiquity. Conversely, Google did. And now Google is the search engine. Even Microsoft, which is worth hundreds of billions more than Google, can only put a dent in Google’s marketshare with Bing despite a massive ad campaign push. Microsoft, as the maker of Windows, of course knows best that once a piece of software becomes ubiquitous, it’s almost impossible to lose that advantage.

Facebook, during its growth, knew this. They expanded carefully, intentionally, and at all the right moments. You can’t expand without a good product, and that’s important to note. For all Facebook’s flaws, it’s good at what it does. But the real power of Facebook is that Zuckerberg and his team knew exactly when to expand to what markets. Had they opened up to all users initially, or even skipped straight from college-only to a free-for-all, they would’ve lost. But they didn’t. Which leads to the next point:

Ubiquity

As stated previously, Facebook now has over 500 million active users. For comparison, MySpace has maybe 130 million. If you meet someone new, there’s a very good chance they have a Facebook profile. And that is the real power of Facebook. The usefulness of a social networking site is determined almost solely by how many other people use it. I still have Google Buzz. I know three or four other people who use it. I could use Google Buzz to share something with these three to four people. If I wanted to share it with anyone else, it goes to Facebook. That’s what keeps us coming back.

Facebook has achieved a position of luxury. They have cash on hand. They have a critical mass of users that is ubiquitous enough. Not every single person has one, but especially in developed countries, non-Facebook users are beginning to become a minority. Facebook can now determine where social networking goes. As an example, they’re focusing a lot on Places. Making social networking location-aware. Or the rumored Facebook email service. Any other company looking to start an email service would be forced to generate users from scratch. Facebook could conceivably get more active Facebook mail users than Gmail in a single day simply by adding a banner above the Newsfeed. Facebook now competes with other companies that are leagues above them. Microsoft’s Hotmail which, despite all reason and sense of taste, is the number one online email service by userbase. And there are fewer Hotmail users than Facebook users. Facebook could put a serious dent in that userbase.

Facebook isn’t all-powerful. No tech company is. But this kind of advantage that comes from ubiquity is the kind that puts start-ups like Diaspora in a seriously unfavorable position. If MySpace, LiveJournal and all the other social networking sites that have been in the business for years are having trouble competing, then a start up like Diaspora is going to have an intense road ahead.

It’s not impossible. But no one should expect this David to slay Facebook’s Goliath overnight. Or even over the next few years. For the forseeable future, Facebook will be synonymous with social networking the way that Windows is synonymous with desktop/laptop computing.

Photo

Mon, 08 Nov 2010 01:06:37 -0500

Dear OC: Can I Take A Break?

Sun, 07 Nov 2010 18:20:38 -0500

Dear OC: Can I Take A Break?:

Lacara asks:

“dear oc: I’m now half done with a 3 week late paper. It feels like an accomplishment. Do I continue working, or relax?”

Dear Lacara:

The fact that you are three weeks overdue on…

Bigfoot Launch Delayed, Possibly Canceled

Wed, 27 Oct 2010 15:08:06 -0400

I am not interested in Bigfoot. I’ve seen alleged photos of what it’s supposed to look like but, as near as I can tell, Bigfoot looks almost identical to other members of its related family. I can’t be the only one to have noticed the similarities. And yet, Bigfoot is one of those legendary creatures right up there with the unicorn and the Loch Ness monster. Why? Scarcity.

Have you ever seen Bigfoot? No. Have you ever even been near Bigfoot? Nope. If you told someone you had seen Bigfoot, would you make the news? You bet you would. Would they care if you were telling the truth? Some would. Others, probably not. Either way, someone would want to hear your story. And if you had photos of Bigfoot, regardless of whether they come from questionable origins, they’d be plastered all over every major news outlet. At last, the mystery revealed! Here it is!

There’s a lot of folks that want Bigfoot. Bigfoot is in high demand, regardless of whether that demand will ever be satisfied. And the truth is, it might not. We keep hoping that we’ll see Bigfoot next week, next month, maybe next year, but if we’re really honest, we may never see it. Or worse. When we do, Bigfoot may be DOA. Bigfoot only has a limited lifespan. By the time we finally see Bigfoot, it may already be too late.

[Now go back and replace every instance of ‘Bigfoot’ with ‘the white iPhone 4’.]

The New Nook Is Going To Crush You With Awesome

Tue, 26 Oct 2010 16:54:00 -0400

This is the new, color Nook. And this woman? She is terrified of it. Look at her. She is taken aback by the mind-boggling vastness of it’s potential. She is positively floored. Or about to be.

Do you understand? Do you get just how unbelievable this new Nook is? I DON’T THINK YOU DO.

It’s magnificent. Unbelievable. Positively flabbergasting. Mesmerizingly ostentatious.

It’s like….

….whoa.
[Originally published on Autistic Disdain]

Trust-Building Exercise: Check Your Mate’s Private Messages

Mon, 25 Oct 2010 13:38:19 -0400

Trust-Building Exercise: Check Your Mate’s Private Messages:

Starting a new relationship can be tough. It takes time to develop trust. Generally it requires a series of risks, placing a little more of yourself in another person’s hands to prove they’re worthy…

He’s been caught.

Sat, 23 Oct 2010 12:23:21 -0400

He’s been caught.

How To Motivate Your Students

Wed, 06 Oct 2010 09:39:19 -0400

How To Motivate Your Students:

One reader writes:

“I have a lot of students who are failing…I can’t really do much if they turn stuff in blank and don’t ask questions…so, not sure what i’m going to do. The stuff they aren’t…