alexandraerin | May. 19th, 2011

May. 19th, 2011

Note: I'm going to start adding the date on here because I've noticed that more than half of May has slipped past when I wasn't looking. I keep thinking it's the beginning of the month. On the 16th I started making a list of things to be accomplished before the 15th... I know that I *see* the date when I make a post, in the sense that it's on the screen, but actually having to check it and type it out will probably help me keep a better idea of the march of time.

News For Today

Well, in what I consider to be personal news, I read a negative review and didn't let it affect me. :P The first one star review for GOTBG showed up on Amazon. I'd made a deal with myself not to read it because it would probably be from someone who simply didn't find it appealing.

But then I had a wriggling tentacle of doubt: what if there's some big hoary formatting problem that I overlooked? What if I broke something? This was my first long-form Kindle project, so the possibility of technical difficulties seemed very real.

So I clicked on it. And read it. And said, "Oh, okay."

In short, it's not a technical based complaint. And it's the sort of thing that would raise my blood pressure if left as a comment on my site, because it's not "I didn't like this and here's why.", it's "This book is bad and here's why." with a side of "Anybody who says they like it is a sock puppet."

But it didn't faze me on Amazon. I had to stop and think about why that is, and I came up with two reasons.

One is that critical comments on my site I perceive as being directed to me, *at* me. A stray comment on a single chapter is not going to be looked at by someone who's making up their mind about whether to read Tales of MU or not. It's not going to be noticed by every single reader. Its intended audience is the author of the work. Reviews on Amazon? They're intended for other potential readers.

So why don't I care if someone's telling other potential readers what they found to be bad about my book? Because they're ultimately doing everybody involved a service. The negative reviewer makes it clear that their viewpoint is based on conventions of writing in traditional publishing, which is good because it'll help steer people who won't "get" my work away from it. If that negative review stops some people who hold similar views from also buying the book.... well, then I'll have fewer negative reviews. And fewer unsatisfied customers. And that's the second reason why I'm not so affected by knowing about negative reviews on Amazon.

I like Amazon's review system, in general, because it seems to encourage expansiveness... you can see not just how many people liked something but *why* they liked or disliked it. To me, that sort of thing is going to be more valuable than "stars" as media becomes less homogeneous.

I'm not a huge fan of the "averaged star" ranking system, because if you get a crowd of people rating something three stars, that means quite a different thing than a book that has an equal number of people rating it with five and one. One is a book that most people find to be average-ish, the other is something that people either love or hate.

Though honestly I'm not sure that there are great crowds of books out there that get a three star reputation because everyone rates them three stars.

I don't know. I suppose my point is that it's less useful to know how many people liked a thing than it is to who liked it (in general terms, as in "People who liked this book also liked...") and why they liked it... or why they disliked it. A good, informative negative review will do the service of letting other people who might not like the book see that.

Amazon has the "People who bought this book also bought..." function in place, which is great not just for teaching shoppers about other things similar to the thing they're looking at that they might want to buy but also for telling them "If you bought some of these other things, maybe you really will like the thing you're looking at." Now that they have a "Like" button, I'm hopeful that they'll make some similar way of navigating "linked likes".

(Amusingly, since most of the people who've purchased GOTBG so far have heard about it directly from me, the "also bought" includes books I blogged about/recommended... dance, puppets, dance! It's nice to think that people bought The Big Bah-Ha on my recommendation.)

Anyway, I just thought of a third reason why I'm not upset about the negative review: the reviewer has never heard of me and bought it based on the title alone. That's exactly what I hoped for with the title, and it's good to know that it's working.

If anyone's got the impulse to "counter" the negative review, I don't suggest going to argue with it... the reviewer is operating from a different viewpoint than the positive reviews, and Amazon already does a good job of presenting the contrasting viewpoints.

Instead, "Like"-ing the book on Amazon, adding your own positive review, and clicking "Yes" on "Was this review helpful" for the positive ones are all ways of making sure that the fact that this book has an audience who appreciates it doesn't get drowned out.

(Also, *Like* the Facebook page. There's not a lot of info there right this moment because I just set it up, while talking about Like-ing things put the idea into my head.)

Personal Assessment

Left knee is quite a bit out of whack. Woke up late and waking up slowly.

Plans For Today

Yesterday was kind of a mixed bag of writing. Today I'm going to focus on Tales of MU proper. I've got a huge advantage for this week and next week in that the first chapter of next week is going to be Callahan's class again. Callahan's a pure and very easy joy to write, her class is an established quantity, etc., so there is an excellent chance of having it done before it's "due".

After that we'll have been through all of Mackenzie's classes once so I can get a little more flexible in my pacing... it's a bit like navigating a rocky harbor and then hitting open water.

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/274624.html

Okay, so eagle-eyed readers spotted that I put a reference to the MUniverse equivalent of a Cracked article into a recent chapter of Tales of MU. This is actually something of an anachronism, as the MU timeline as it was originally conceived was a bit behind ours in terms of any parallels.... the year 222 M.E. was chosen because I went to college 222 years after the American revolution was kicked off.

I love Cracked for a lot of reasons, but me being me, one of the reasons I love it is because it's a great indication of how big a game-changer the internet is. When I was growing up, Cracked was an inferior imitation of the venerable Mad Magazine. I loved Mad for being a source of consistently awesome and well-constructed and hilarious puns (also known as the only kind of puns there are) and also for being one of the two sources of information about transsexual/transgenderism that was available to a small-town kid when I was growing up.

(The other major source was TV shows and movies. In both cases, the information was the same: "This concept actually exists, and it is both hilarious and creepy." But you know what? That was better than not knowing it existed. Thinking oneself to be a kind of freak that actually exists out in the world is better than thinking oneself to simply be a freakish anomaly of a freak. This, of course, is another way that the internet is a game-changer.)

Nowadays, of course, Cracked is not an inferior knock-off of anything. They're not the only daily update humor site. I can't point to any one thing they definitively started doing before anyone else. But they do everything they do so well. And their articles have actually enriched my life in a few ways.

But of course, even a... fixed clock... is wrong... once a... okay, this metaphor doesn't work. The point is that everyone gets things wrong sometimes. Cracked as an entity has no viewpoint, it's made up of individual writers and outside submitters. But the one of those individual writers who came up with one of today's offerings, a tongue-in-cheek analysis of the way news spread across the internet in the wake of Osama's death, missed the mark, I believe.

He's talking about how we all follow celebrities and such on Twitter, which increases the chances that we'll only get their viewpoints and their takes on the news. He says this:

When JFK was killed, Walter Cronkite broke into an episode of As the World Turns to tell the nation. Nobody breaks into your Twitter feed to tell you that CNN's Breaking News feed is going to be reporting actual breaking news for the next three days.

But you know what? That's pretty close to what happens. The person on your Twitter feed who follows CNN will retweet the important, attention-grabbing stories. If all you follow are celebrities, then when you see The Rock or some guy from the Jersey Shore tweeting a 140 character blurb about some major news thing, you're going to hit Google. There was a story in the news recently about just how much news traffic is being generated by stuff shared on Facebook. That same principle applies here.

I'm not trying to offer a serious critique of the Cracked article here. But it provides a useful-jumping off point for repeating something I've said before, regarding publishing: we're the new gatekeepers. Us.

Was there some problem with people finding about Osama's death? No. The whole industrialized western world found out about it, and as individuals a lot of us learned about it faster than we would have if we had to wait until we were within earshot of a television or radio.

And it's not just big stories that get channeled to our ears. It's "little" stories, stuff that's important to us but that the media would not position as a major story. To some extent that contributes to the online echo chamber effect, as we all funnel stories to each other that we know the recipients are likely to be interested in or agree with (or be outraged by), but anybody who's spent more than 15 minutes on a social network knows it's impossible to be completely insulated from opposing viewpoints.

There are a lot of things that can be critiqued in the way we collectively covered and responded to the coverage of Osama bin Laden's death, but the way the information spread through Twitter doesn't begin to "prove we're screwed".

Crossposts: http://alexandraerin.livejournal.com/274700.html

So, a lot of people are still opposed to gay marriage. This is a true thing, and one we have to contend with. But a lot of those people are equally quick to say that they don't support equal rights for gay people. Some of them are just being assholes and will add, "A gay guy can marry a woman just like any other man can!", but I genuinely believe that most of the people who are against gay marriage would not be opposed to gay people deciding who inherits their property, being able to share property jointly, being able to be at each other's bedsides in critical or end-of-life care situations, etc.

If you are one of those people who don't mind gay people existing and having rights... if you're in favor of civil unions or domestic partnerships, or if you're opposed to those things but think that there's nothing wrong with a gay couple designating each other as beneficiaries, co-account-holders, executors, attorney-power-holders, etc., just like any other two human beings can...

Then you have to ask yourself: is your fondness for the word "marriage" as a legal term exclusively referring to something between one man and one woman more important than your belief in equality for all?

Because as long as you're willing to show up at the polls and vote for gay marriage bans and as long as you're willing to sign petitions or answer surveys saying you'd like to keep marriage between one man and one woman, you are a weapon that is being used to take away rights from your fellow human beings.

See, whatever you believe you're voting for or against, the people who are completely against gays having any rights at all are going to take the support you give them and argue against everything. If a gay couple try to change their names to signify that they're a family, someone with no vested interest in their case can step in and say, "The voters of this state approved a ban on gay marriage. If you let these two people both be Smiths, then you're doing an end-run against the wishes of the people." Even if the couple in question is following the statutory name-change process that's open to anyone in their state.

Think no judge would listen to an argument like that? It's happened. Sometimes the judge is the one who puts the argument forward. Here's a news article from three days ago about such a case that references another one. Note that in both cases the initial decision was changed, but these cases show that anyone who thinks that we don't "need" marriage equality because there are other routes to the same rights and privileges is making an unfounded assumption. Note that it was the same judge in both cases... he had to be argued into allowing it twice. This isn't a settled question by a long shot.

And of course we have Wisconsin's governor fighting to balance the budget and create jobs by declaring a civil union law to be unconstitutional. Why? Because Wisconsin has a gay marriage ban. In some cases these arguments are made on the basis that a gay marriage ban implicitly bans something that's just like marriage but with a different name. In this case, the Wisconsin ban also covers "equivalent structures".

Did 100% of the people who were in favor of a gay marriage ban in Wisconsin understand that they were also approving an "AND THE HORSE YOU RODE IN ON!" clause? Did they know that their support was being used to make gays second-class citizens in a way that goes beyond "well, they can't get married" to "and they can't use other laws to do things that other people, even unmarried ones, can freely do if they follow the legal procedures"?

And if they had known, would it have made a difference?

Or is protecting the sanctity of a word so gosh-darned important to small government social consevatives that they will strip away any number of existing rights from their fellow citizens in order to be able to vote for a gay marriage ban?

If you read the comments on any news story or blog post about gay marriage rights in the wilds of the internet, you'll find a number of ban-supporters saying things like, "Let them have civil unions." or "Give them the rights but call it something else." or "Nobody needs to get married. You can accomplish the same thing with incorporation, living wills, power of attorney, name change, and so on. If they cared so much about this they'd be willing to do the work."

Yeah, that's a nice thought (sort of), but it doesn't change the reality that gay marriage bans (or possibly even just the absence of legal recognition of gay marriage in the first place) are used to stop people from doing just these things.

Here is a simple truth, my fellow citizens of the United States of America: if you don't want marriage to be applied to same-sex couples but you are in favor of equal rights in every other way, then you have to make a choice every time you go to the polls.

As long as you're willing to vote for and give money towards the banning of gay marriage, you are aiding in the destruction of civil liberties. Don't salve your conscience by telling yourself that there are other options. You are destroying those options even as you say that.

If you believe in your heart that marriage is between one man and one woman, go on believing it in your heart. But when you put it in writing with the force of law then your voice will be cited as the reason that families are torn apart, that people who are loved die alone anyway, that houses and property are confiscated in the midst of tragedies... all of these things have happened and will continue to happen anywhere that gay marriage has been banned or voted down.

For people who do support marriage equality: remember this when it's on the ballot or on the political radar where you live. Remember that a good chunk of the people who will vote against marriage equality are doing so under the assumption that they're leaving the door open for alternatives, or that alternatives already exist.

Pointing these cases out needs to become a bigger part of the movement's repertoire. We need to be telling the people who think we're all entitled to the same rights but don't believe that marriage is a right that their vote will be used to take away rights. We need to be telling the "Call it something else!" people that when they vote against the word "marriage", they're voting against "Something Else".