We Have Always Been At War With DOMA

Unpacking my own hypocrisy (maybe?) and avoiding getting gaslit by the Obama administration.

After I read Kal Penn’s memoir, I was pretty salty about how it just barely even mentioned being not-straight1For lack of a better description, since I don’t know exactly whether Kal Penn identifies as gay, bisexual, queer, etc., and instead treated it as if had been a non-issue. He casually says that in his mid-20s, his friends already “knew that [he] was dating dudes;” he makes a passing reference about figuring out his sexuality; and he has a chapter about his partner that is more about NASCAR than anything else.

That’s pretty much it. It stands out because so much of the book is about facing discrimination as an Indian-American working in Hollywood, or as an actor (at the time primarily known for his work in stoner comedies) working in the Obama Administration, but makes absolutely zero attempt at describing any kind of intersectionality with his sexual orientation.

It’s been bugging me for the last few weeks, since I’ve been wondering how much, if at all, my criticism makes me a hypocrite.

Continue reading “We Have Always Been At War With DOMA”
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    For lack of a better description, since I don’t know exactly whether Kal Penn identifies as gay, bisexual, queer, etc.

Tapped

Lorcana, memories of Magic the Gathering, and the value of novelty

There is absolutely no way I can justify buying the new Disney Lorcana trading card game. I’ve still got a few boxes full of Magic: the Gathering cards that have followed me across several moves, even though I was never that big into the game, and I haven’t played it in almost 10 years. I’ve got several other trading card games, and even more deckbuilding games, that I’ve accumulated over the years, and they’re all sitting unplayed.

But I mean, come on. It would be absurd for me to even try and pretend I’m not going to pick up at least a starter pack of the Lorcana decks, so why even bother going through the motions, when we all know how this is going to turn out?

In an attempt to pretend to be responsible, I imposed a rule that I have to get rid of all my Magic the Gathering cards before I can bring any new TCGs into the house1I really should find new homes for my copies of Netrunner and Doomtown while I’m at it..

And it was while I was sorting through the cards that I hit upon the epiphany that launched this post: hey, you know what, Magic is a really well-designed game!

Continue reading “Tapped”
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    I really should find new homes for my copies of Netrunner and Doomtown while I’m at it.

All That Heaven Affords

Observations about the optimism of design and designers

This was prompted by a recent blog post by Cabel Sasser called “Fantasy Meets Reality.” He writes about various cases where the design of physical spaces (mostly theme parks) breaks down when it comes into contact with actual human beings.

Cabel mentions how design needs to make different assumptions based on culture and location; even within the subcategory of “Disney theme park,” for instance, there can be dramatically different ideas of how much guests are compelled to follow the rules, and different understandings of what the rules even are.

There’s a sense of optimism in that post — not just because of Cabel’s inescapably infectious enthusiasm for things, but because of the sense that is often common among designers, that these are problems that can be solved, and that thoughtful design is often the answer.

Continue reading “All That Heaven Affords”

Remembrances of Block Rockin Beats Past

Blindsided by the nostalgia bomb delivered by The Chemical Brothers

Several weeks ago, I was feeling down, and an emergency trip to Anaheim wasn’t helping. On the drive back home, I decided to listen to The Chemical Brothers’ album Dig Your Own Hole from start to finish, something I haven’t done since the early 2000s, most likely.

I was completely surprised by how much of a cozy, warm, weighted-blanket comfort record that had become for me. It instantly took me back to the days of working on Monkey 3, going to see The Saint1Forgettable movie, incredible soundtrack at a screening, and weeks of driving around Marin County listening to “Setting Sun” and freaking out. It was such a surprisingly good memory of such a specific time, before reality started creeping in, and I could just be overjoyed with where I’d found myself in life.

And I was surprised that it’d be Dig Your Hole that became such a comforting2Or, since it’s British, homely record, since at the time, I just imagined it was music for wild, drug-fueled raves held in converted ruins and ancient-dungeons-turned-nightclubs all over the UK. The band’s marketing sure leaned into that image, with everything looking like a TV series where Prodigy was in charge of MI6, until I’m assuming they’d sold enough records to be able to take control over their own image, and hire people like Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze to make their videos.

I’ve never been to a drug-fueled rave, UK or otherwise, so the images it conjures for me are of Fairfax and San Anselmo, CA, going to lunch at wacky Thai or Casa Mañana, the theater in Corte Madera, Tightwad Tuesday at the theater in Novato, taking the long way to work that went through redwoods, watching The X-Files at my best friends’ apartment, and getting that first spectacular view of San Francisco as you come through what is now called the Robin Williams tunnel. I was very happy to get all those memories back, and I was singing and car-dancing like a maniac all the way up I-5.

There’s just one unanswered question from those days that still haunts me, though: who is this doin this synthetic type of alpha beta psychedelic funkin’?

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    Forgettable movie, incredible soundtrack
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    Or, since it’s British, homely

Subverting the Thing

Barbie, David Letterman, and the impossibility of being a mass-market radical

I didn’t like the Barbie movie very much, but I can’t stress enough how much that doesn’t matter. I didn’t dislike it, because it’s got some really good performances by actors who understood the assignment completely, a couple of stand-out gags1Especially the narrator’s voice-over about how appropriate it was to cast Margot Robbie, and it works pretty well as a modern homage to so many classic fantasy movies that inspired it. In that interview with director and co-writer Greta Gerwig, she mentions Barbie greeting Astronaut Barbies and saying “Yay, space!” and it really is a fantastic, charming moment.

The most clever thing about the trailers for the movie was the tagline that went something like “If you love Barbie, you’ll love this movie. If you hate Barbie, you’ll love this movie.” It might simply be that I’ve never had a strong opinion about Barbie one way or the other, so I couldn’t get into this movie. But it’s a toy company spending tens if not hundreds of millions of dollars to deliver an honest and earnest message about feminism to as wide an audience as possible, so what could possibly be the problem?

My biggest issue with it isn’t that it’s bad, but that it was so on-the-nose that I never felt like I had anything to engage with. It was two hours of characters always saying exactly what was on their minds, explicitly delivering a message that I already agreed with. Everything that seemed like an original or clever twist on the basic premise (which I’d already seen on SNL, to be honest) had already been given away in the inescapable torrent of marketing for the movie.

It’d be churlish and hypocritical to be too critical of anything I thought was “just fine overall,” much less one that explicitly comments how the patriarchy demands that women be exceptional just to be recognized as having any worth at all.2And especially when a bunch of dipshits have tried to leverage Mattel’s marketing budget to take their own idiotic potshots in their own stupid attempt at a culture war. I don’t actually have any strong opinions about the movie, but about the idea that it was subversive.

Continue reading “Subverting the Thing”
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    Especially the narrator’s voice-over about how appropriate it was to cast Margot Robbie
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    And especially when a bunch of dipshits have tried to leverage Mattel’s marketing budget to take their own idiotic potshots in their own stupid attempt at a culture war.

Being Reminded of Sarah Marshall

Nostalgia for a nostalgic TV series from the early 2000s is making me nostalgic for a rewind to the early 2000s.

Last week I was forced out of retirement to re-explain the end of How I Met Your Mother to people on YouTube who just didn’t get it, man. That re-awakened my long-dormant fandom for the series, which has had the side effect of waking up every morning the past few days with “Let’s Go To The Mall” going through my head1In the running with “the cake is a lie” as one of those brilliant pop culture ideas that got ruined by excessive repetition.

I honestly can’t tell if it’s ironic or completely predictable that a series all about nostalgia has triggered a fierce nostalgia in me for the early 2000s. And I’d never made the connection before, but that period — from around 2003 to around 2008 — was the time before Twitter really took off.

To be honest, I probably overestimate the impact Twitter had on pop culture, and we were all headed towards being cynical, pedantic, self-righteous, and bitter anyway. But I still get super-strong feelings of “They couldn’t make a show like that nowadays!” when I think about the early seasons of How I Met Your Mother.

Continue reading “Being Reminded of Sarah Marshall”
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    In the running with “the cake is a lie” as one of those brilliant pop culture ideas that got ruined by excessive repetition

My Five-Year-Old (Computer) Could Make That!

Supply, demand, and how the Steam Store helped me feel less anxious about the threat of machine learning

Featured image is a weird portrait of me as a barbarian or something, generated by one of those Midjourney-style AI toys

There’s a style of character design that I used to like a lot, until recently. It’s that exaggerated-but-still-kind-of-heroic cartoony style that I most associated with games like the Torchlight series. It managed to be appealing but not too simplistic, somewhat painterly but still approachable, bringing a novel and intentional, artistic, interpretative design to a medium that for too long seemed to prize photorealism above all else.

Now, though, I associate it with cheap, exploitative, pay-to-play games. It more or less became the de facto art style for every one of those mobile- or Facebook games that were advertised incessantly, but still managed to do absolutely nothing that I could recognize to distinguish themselves. That style of character design went from something that I aspired to, to something that I viscerally disliked, just because the market became flooded with it.1Ironic, since so many of these games seem to involve trying to save a character from a flooded, trap-filled room.

Continue reading “My Five-Year-Old (Computer) Could Make That!”
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    Ironic, since so many of these games seem to involve trying to save a character from a flooded, trap-filled room.

Lessons from the BearPig

Learning to think of myself as an ever-improving artist instead of a bad artist

Something I realized tonight is that a lot of my perception of my own art abilities is probably due to having my first job in video games be at LucasArts.

I was pretty over-confident when I started there, and I thought of myself as at least a pretty good artist if not an exceptional one. I didn’t have any aspirations of taking a full-time job as an artist or animator, but I figured I wasn’t bad for a programmer, and being around so many talented professionals would be a great opportunity to get better.

The attitude at the company — or at least, the parts of the company that I came in contact with — was a lot more binary than that: you either were an artist, or you weren’t. “Programmer art” was at best disposable, and more often something that was to be sought out and destroyed as early and as thoroughly as possible, lest it somehow infect the game and bring shame down upon the entire company.

To be clear, I don’t think it was at all unreasonable. There’s no sense in having art made by amateurs in a place that was hiring some of the best professional artists in the business. And I get it on a personal level, too. I wouldn’t want somebody coming in and trying to do my job, even if they were good at it. But it did have a permanent side effect: it made me start to think of my own art skills not just as “not professional,” but as “not fit to be seen by humans.”

It’s only recently that I’ve started to break free from the Talent Binary. It doesn’t have to be either professional-quality or worthless. I’ve slowly started to appreciate that the stuff I draw doesn’t necessarily have to be great, that it’s okay if it’s just good enough. Does it convey what it needs to convey, and does it seem “genuine” instead of just an uninspired copy of someone else’s work? That’s probably good enough.

I also started to appreciate that it doesn’t even necessarily need to be good, if I enjoy doing it. It’s only by being in environments that literally treated art as a commodity that I got locked in the mindset of art as being a product. It’s okay to just have fun trying. And I also started to accept that while I might be able to reach a level of skill that I’m completely satisfied with, if I put in the work every day to practice and get better, I don’t actually enjoy it enough to do that. It feels pretty good to let myself off the hook, without thinking that I have to give it up entirely.

There was a piece of programmer art in The Curse of Monkey Island that was a perfect example of the lessons I should have taken from LucasArts instead of the ones that I did.

For quite a long time during development, the title screen of the game was a DeluxePaint creation by my boss, the lead programmer. It was a simple scene with a calming, light blue background. In the center was the text “The Curse of Monkey Island,” in the usual SCUMM dialog font which some nerd out there probably knows the exact name of but I don’t. Below was a curved line depicting a beautiful sandy beach, and on either side were delightfully abstracted palm trees made from an assortment of brown and green polygons. And in the center of the screen was a face: a perfect brown circle, with two light brown semi-circles representing the ears, two black circles for the eyes, and a light brown circle that was the snout. As the title text suggested, it was the Bear Pig of Monkey Island. At the time, and being the arrogant little shits that we were, we made fun of it. Even the artist himself called it “bad programmer art.”

But was it? It did exactly what it needed to do, which is provide a backdrop for game initialization and indicate where the final title sequence would begin. And during development, it set the mood. This wasn’t just some numbered sequel, but a story with a title and everything. The island evoked the crystal clear waters and sandy beaches of the Caribbean, to envelop us in our tropical setting every day while we sat inside a dark windowless office in Northern California.

And the Bear Pig was a reminder of the folly of arrogant men trying to tamper in God’s domain, daring to create blasphemous, hybrid monstrosities that could serve no possible purpose other than to be a lesson in human fallibility. A valuable lesson to all of us not to get too cocky while working in one of our favorite franchises!

So was it “good” art? No. Oh God, no. No no no no no. But was it good enough? Also no. But… did it serve its purpose? Considering that 25 years later, it’s still a fun memory of one of the best experiences I’ve ever had on a team I’m still amazed I was lucky enough to work with, I’d give it a qualified “maybe.”

Long Live the Smarm

The Queen is dead. Now is the time of warring edgelords.

Update 09/14/22: I’d hope it wouldn’t need to be said, but “showing grace after someone’s death” doesn’t include “screwing over people needing essential services in a display of extended performative wealth-hoarding.” This post is seeming increasingly tone-deaf the more I hear about how England is handling the mourning rituals, but I was exclusively talking about people debasing themselves on Twitter either for yuks or narcissistic self-righteous indignation. Also: nothing in this post applies to the recent death of Ken Starr. Make fun of him all you want, because that guy was a really irredeemable bag of shit.

When I wrote about Michael Schur’s book How to Be Perfect, I mentioned how I was disappointed that he’d chosen to praise two of my least favorite essays ever published on the internet. One of those was John Scalzi’s probably-well-intentioned but disingenuously tone deaf analogy for the concept of “privilege” as playing a video game on the easiest difficulty. The other was an absolute piece of garbage from Gawker1Redundant? titled “On Smarm.”

I’m not a good enough writer to describe the visceral reaction I had to reading that essay; it was as if the concentrated nugget of evil from Time Bandits had been converted to HTML and was actually being praised online by seemingly dozens of people who should’ve known better. If I remember correctly, my eyes widened and I impotently screamed and pointed at the obscenity, like Carrie White’s mom, then ran away and took a shower, knowing that I’d never be able to wash myself clean of the stain of it.

Ostensibly, the essay was about the tendency of politicians, pundits, corporate media, and “authority figures” in general to stifle criticism or opposition via insincere, overwrought tone-policing. We saw a perfect example of this recently, when Beto O’Rourke called out some trash in the audience who was laughing after O’Rourke was talking about the Uvalde children who’d been murdered in their school. Plenty of people — including NPR, in their desperate attempt to both-sides everything — instantly began deflecting from the epidemic of gun violence in the US, instead running to their fainting couches and worrying whether it were appropriate for a prominent gubernatorial candidate to be using the f-bomb2My self-censoring might seem like a hypocritical example of smarm, but the fact is simply that I promised my mother I’d stop using the word in public.

On the surface, that sounds fine, even if it’s too shallow to qualify as significant social commentary. That kind of smarminess is abundantly obvious, and it doesn’t actually fool anyone who isn’t already eager to be fooled. Call out that nonsense if you want, but it’s not a genuine threat because nobody of substance is actually buying it.

The problem is that that trivially-true observation was used as the vehicle for defending the awful mission statement of Gawker, the candy coating wrapped around the poison pill that had passed undigested through Nick Denton’s intestinal tract. The morally bankrupt notion of shittiness as a public service. The disingenuous idea that being gossipy, crass, petty, bitter, hypocritical, and narcissistic is okay as long as you can make the case that you’re “punching up.”

If you had the misfortune of being on Twitter last Friday and the following weekend, seeing the reaction to the death of Queen Elizabeth II, you’d quickly see that that although original Gawker is dead3Apparently a version of the former site has been brought back to life by people almost as adept at being self-righteously shitty and awful? I haven’t read it, and won’t., that mindset is still alive and in full force.

In both varieties, too. There was the predictable wave of smarmy and insincere In Memoriams, from politicians eager to distract attention away from whatever they’re doing wrong at the moment, and from corporations too eager to show how reverential they are. Even here in the US, they were excessive, so I can only imagine what a barrage of insincerity it was for people in the UK and other places that still have the Queen on their money. And in addition to being predictable, they were pretty transparent.

What stood out a lot more to me, though, were the people practically stumbling over themselves to be shitty about the death of a much-beloved woman. A lot of it was dumb and obvious but probably harmless; I’ve fallen hard off the wagon and have almost returned to my 2009-era levels of posting nonsense on Twitter, but even I’m knew enough not to make hacky jokes about chess, bees, or Freddie Mercury. But I was more struck by how many people were doing the virtual equivalent of dancing on her grave.

And then, the part that reminded me of Gawker and “On Smarm”: throwing a days-long shit fit when they got called out on it. They will not be tone-policed by royalists! “Don’t speak ill of the dead” is not just wrong, it is anti-journalism! Repeated comments on how this was a joyous occasion for Irish or Scottish people. And of course, all the variations on how people of European descent have no right to be telling “folks”4My new least-favorite thing on the internet is preachy, self-righteous types using “folk” instead of “people” as some bizarre signifier of community or identity, ignoring that the word “folks” has decades of connotations that are even more othering, making it sound like you’re talking about people from Appalachia or The Shire. from places that had been colonized by Europeans how they should be reacting to the death of their oppressor.

Now, I’m an extremely white guy from the United States, but I’m pretty confident in saying that one thing that unites us across cultures and nations is that talking trash about someone who just died is petty and shitty. Different people have their own ideas of when it’s justified, but that doesn’t make it any less petty or shitty.

I can think of at least 5 Americans alive today for whom news of their death will fill me with glee, because death is the only way they’ll ever face any consequences for all the terrible stuff they’ve done. I fully admit that I did feel satisfaction and vindication hearing of Rush Limbaugh’s death, for instance, and also Ronald Reagan’s, and being reminded that there were probably, somehow, people who loved them in life and were sad at their passing didn’t affect that feeling of petty satisfaction at all. That doesn’t make it any less petty, though; it’s just a level of personal shittiness on my part that I’m willing to accept and won’t try to defend by claiming it’s justified or at all righteous.

As adults, we can acknowledge that two things can be true at the same time: 1) The Queen served as a kindly, grandmotherly face on centuries of atrocities done in the name of the British Empire; and 2) That kindly, familiar face of stability was hugely important to millions of people. Of course it’s true that the image of a nice old woman who loved her dogs and had a pretty good sense of humor, is inseparable from the history of stolen wealth, colonialism, and scandals, both decades old and recent. Both as a figurehead, and as someone who was complicit to one degree or another.5I am one of those people who believes that how complicit you are in wrong-doing makes a huge difference. Are you actively making people’s lives worse, are you knowingly benefitting from it and refusing to make reparations, or are you just a representation of it? But if they’re inseparable, that means that you have to accept both.

There was a video going around on Friday, in which a member of the royal guard was telling a pretty charming story about the Queen’s sense of humor: An American tourist encountered them in passing, but didn’t recognize the Queen. When the guard said that he’d met the Queen before, the tourist got excited and asked Elizabeth to take a picture of the two of them together. It’s cute, but it’s also an example of how even a story intended to humanize her is entirely based on her being the Queen of England. The role was universally recognized even if the person wasn’t, and the vast majority of people in the world will never know the difference, or even if a tangible difference exists. (How much of a unique person is left when you’re born into a role and spend your entire life publicly serving it? Do I need to watch The Crown to know the answers?)

Anyway, for anyone trying to turn this into a teachable moment about the history of colonialism, imperialism, stolen crown jewels, or any of the other evils from a century’s worth of world history: your meme of the Queen meeting Margaret Thatcher in Hell ain’t it. Neither is your video of Irish dancing in front of Buckingham Palace. But then, they’re not truly intended to be teachable moments; they’re narcissistic displays that people try to dress up as being more righteous when they get called out for being vulgar or lacking grace.

That’s the part that reminded me so vividly of “On Smarm” and Gawker in general: the lengths to which people will defend their right to be shitty and awful. Mocking the death of an elderly, much-beloved woman is not just my right, but my duty! The thing I found most repulsive about the whole mentality of “On Smarm” was that it was so deeply cynical to the point of nihilism; it didn’t just reject insincere displays of false compassion or sympathy, it refused to even entertain the idea that public compassion or sympathy — or just plain good taste and grace — could ever be genuine. All of Gawker Media was rooted in the assertion that every one of you is as awful as we are, you’re just not brave enough to admit it! It’s an ethos that somehow manages to be more repulsive than Randian Objectivism, because it so frequently sucks in people whose opinions I actually care about.

And that’s not even getting to the rancid, rainbow-colored oil slick of hypocrisy floating on the top of it: it’s its own kind of smarminess, evident in the sheer outrage at being tone-policed by white Europeans who can’t understand the history of oppression that’s embedded in shitty, opportunistic mockery of somebody who just died. It’s still disingenuous self-righteousness, but at least the people who are publicly performing their Reverence For Her Majesty as a distraction are aware at some level that they’re being disingenuous.

Personally, I’m anti-imperialist (both in British and American flavors), and I think the monarchy should be abolished. Those aren’t in any way bold or controversial claims; I think they’re just table stakes for being a decent person in the 21st century. Which is what the whole question of “grace” ultimately comes down to: being a decent person. You don’t have to respect the United Kingdom, or the monarchy, to still be able to respect the people who are affected by it and who lived their entire lives surrounded by it. A lot of people, including myself, could be better educated about the details of history of imperialism and colonialism, not from the point of view of the colonists, but of the people affected.6In college I took a course in African History, because it was a topic I knew almost nothing about. It was essentially a course about Europeans, with almost nothing about the cultures apart from how they were affected — or outright devastated — by colonialism. But there’s a time for that, and it isn’t when someone is really sad because it feels like their grandma just died. Even if they’re sad because they’re focusing on the positive aspects of a public persona, and choosing not to focus on the bad while they’re in mourning. If you’re the type of person to stand outside of a funeral and shout “Your grandma is in Hell because of the British Raj!” there’s a word for you, and it’s not “activist” or “educator.”

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    Redundant?
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    My self-censoring might seem like a hypocritical example of smarm, but the fact is simply that I promised my mother I’d stop using the word in public
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    Apparently a version of the former site has been brought back to life by people almost as adept at being self-righteously shitty and awful? I haven’t read it, and won’t.
  • 4
    My new least-favorite thing on the internet is preachy, self-righteous types using “folk” instead of “people” as some bizarre signifier of community or identity, ignoring that the word “folks” has decades of connotations that are even more othering, making it sound like you’re talking about people from Appalachia or The Shire.
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    I am one of those people who believes that how complicit you are in wrong-doing makes a huge difference. Are you actively making people’s lives worse, are you knowingly benefitting from it and refusing to make reparations, or are you just a representation of it?
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    In college I took a course in African History, because it was a topic I knew almost nothing about. It was essentially a course about Europeans, with almost nothing about the cultures apart from how they were affected — or outright devastated — by colonialism.

Department of Pettiness, Young Adult Literature Division

I demand retroactive credit for biting my tongue for so many years.

It has been extensively documented how the author JK Rowling has decided to make sure her legacy is not “obscenely wealthy writer of a much-beloved series of books for young adults,” and is instead “obscenely bigoted whackadoo actively using her platform to make young-adult and adult-adult lives completely unnecessarily miserable.”

I’m not even a fan of Rowling’s, and I still spent far too long trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, and to see things from her perspective. Even when it was clear that she’d crossed the line into irredeemable, I tsk-tsked at the tragedy of someone who could’ve been such a strong force for good, instead being radicalized by opportunists exploiting her feminism to use her as a high-profile mouthpiece for their anti-trans bigotry. Such a shame, I thought, that she’s so attached to a simplistic idea of feminism, and so thin-skinned that she decided to run from criticism into the open arms of the most dangerously hateful and disingenuous people in the United Kingdom. I was too attached to the idea of her being easily-manipulated that I ignored all the evidence that she was actually an egomaniac with a dangerously large megaphone she could use to broadcast a hateful message to millions and millions of people.

But that’s not what this post is about. This post is how I’ve always thought the Harry Potter books were pretty bad, but I was always too polite to say anything.

See, now it’s fashionable to point out that they’re not very good. Or to point out all the depictions of races and species and sexual orientations1More accurately, lack of depictions, I guess that are “problematic,” arguments which have varying levels of believability but which all ignore the larger point, which is that the books aren’t very good.

The first few are pretty readable, which is different. I went to a Borders on the release day for one of them2The third one, maybe? The Goblet of Magic or something? I’m not trying to be cute; I legitimately can’t remember the titles of them., and it was exciting to see so many kids waiting in line, excited to read something new. It reminded me of the days in elementary school when the Scholastic Book Fair orders came in. I happily bought a copy and took it home, and my intention to “just check out the first chapter” quickly turned into my reading the first 100 pages or so without even realizing it. I have, in fact, read all of the books, and although the later ones turned into absurdly over-long and poorly-plotted slogs that were actively unpleasant to read, the first few were paced pretty well.3Apparently, after you get to a certain level of multi-millionaire, you stop having to listen to editors.

They’re also very savvy at marketing, devoting pages to describing things in the wizarding world that kids and adult fans both would be dying to buy. That’s a compliment, by the way: I think planting the ideas for stuff like chocolate frogs and gross jelly beans is a genuinely clever case of listening to and adapting the kinds of things that kids really want, instead of just crassly building a fiction around a toy line.

But it’s become a pet peeve of mine when people say that the books have been ruined by the author’s revealing herself to be kind of an a-hole, since I can assure you that they all came pre-ruined. They made little sense even before the ripped-straight-from-a-mediocre-videogame reveal of the “horcruxes.” Any mystery elements were insultingly shallow, depending on big twists based on ludicrous anagrams, or over-complicated backstories revealed at the last minute.

Quidditch is a dumb game that makes no sense, by any measure, unless you acknowledge that it’s designed only to give the main character a heroic moment where he can win the game all by himself. But that applies to the plotting of every single one of the books, too: they don’t make any real sense, but are just collections of scenes intended to make the main character a hero without ever doing much that’s particularly heroic.

Also, there’s an awful lot of ALL-CAPS YELLING! in both internal monologues and external dialogue, of the kind you’d expect from fan fiction but not from international best sellers. Just pages and page of it. I feel like even when I was an over-emotional teen with highly unique problems and ideas that nobody else in the world was even capable of understanding, I would’ve reacted with, “Jeez, take it down a notch.”

But I always figured that it’d be really churlish of me to mention any of this stuff, considering so many people seemed to be enjoying it. And it would seem to be deeply hypocritical, considering how much time I’ve spent trying to defend “low art” or art “for kids” as having just as much merit as anything else someone might choose to engage with.

To take two things that I’ve enjoyed a lot as examples: it would be pointless snobbery to say that if someone found something impactful and personally meaningful in, say, WandaVision; that that’s shallower or less valid than someone having a meaningful connection with Piranesi. That doesn’t mean that the TV series is as deep or as nuanced as the book, which would be a pretty indefensible argument. It just means that the connection is what’s important. We should be encouraging people to be finding these moments of connection and inspiration wherever they can, instead of telling them that they’re doing it wrong. Or worse, acting like something that is “higher art” is going to connect with everyone the same way that it does with us. Reading The Catcher in the Rye had me sobbing at my desk in high school, but I know plenty of people who didn’t like it at all, and it would be stupid to claim that they’re somehow “wrong.”

So I’m not here to be dismissive of anybody’s personal connection to the Harry Potter books, because there are obviously many, many readers who consider them formative.4Like the Chronicles of Narnia were for me, even though I’d still insist that those are also much, much better-written and more innovative, beyond any personal connection. But I would like people to back off on the claims that they’re objectively good or innovative books, instead of just objectively popular. Some of us recognized all along that they’re not very good, even for books aimed at juveniles. And we’re just juvenile and petty enough to want retroactive credit for not being joyless chodes about it when so many seemed to be having fun and enjoying themselves.

  • 1
    More accurately, lack of depictions, I guess
  • 2
    The third one, maybe? The Goblet of Magic or something? I’m not trying to be cute; I legitimately can’t remember the titles of them.
  • 3
    Apparently, after you get to a certain level of multi-millionaire, you stop having to listen to editors.
  • 4
    Like the Chronicles of Narnia were for me, even though I’d still insist that those are also much, much better-written and more innovative, beyond any personal connection.

Move Over, Bacon, Slowly, Without Making Eye Contact

A short story about the time I went to see a taping of Kate & Allie

Reading Patton Oswalt’s book reminded me of one of his stand-up albums, where he talks about hosting an open mic in which a random heroin addict inadvertently performed a routine that was more brilliant than some professional comedians. That reminded me of this story:

My freshman year of college was in Manhattan, so I’d spend almost all of my free time wandering around the most touristy parts of the city, taking pictures. One day I was walking past a theater near Times Square — I’m guessing now it was the Ed Sullivan Theater? — and they were calling out to passersby to come in and be part of the studio audience for a television show. I was exactly their target demographic of “hapless layabout with nothing better to do,” so I went inside.

It turned out the show was the sitcom Kate & Allie, and the seats for non-ticketed people wandering by the theater were all up in the balcony. When I got up to the balcony, there were around a dozen people already seated, but strangely, almost nobody was in the two front rows. The balcony seat with the best view of the action, dead center in the front row, was taken by one man sitting calmly and quietly. All around him was empty seats. I quietly took my seat a few rows back.

Before long, it became evident why the other people in the audience were giving this guy his space: during recording, he was perfectly silent, but as soon as the director ended a shot, the man would start talking in a non-stop apparent stream-of-consciousness, randomly emphasizing certain words. As soon as recording started again, he would instantly go back to sitting calmly and silently.

I knew even less about mental illness then than I do now, so I wasn’t sure what was the best course of action apart from just leaving him alone. He was inside, safe from the cold, and didn’t seem to be bothering anyone, so I figured, like everyone else had, that there was no point in making it an issue. (I’d lived in New York long enough to learn that the standard operating procedure there is to just ignore anyone who’s not directly getting in your business).

The scene in this episode of Kate and Allie had the irrepressible young boy trying to save time during breakfast by putting all of his food into a blender and mixing it up, God bless ‘im. But there was a technical issue keeping the gag from working. The blender was supposed to spray food hilariously all over the kitchen, but it kept getting stuck in take after take.

The technicians on hand seemed to think that the bacon was the problem. (This caused the man in the front row to start punctuating his non-stop sentences with “bacon” in increasing intensity). The crew tried a few different approaches to fixing it, but seeing as how it was 1989 and CGI wasn’t available to family sitcoms at the time, none of their practical approaches were working.

Finally, one of the crew members said, “We need to find something that’s like bacon, but not bacon.” As if on cue, the man in the front row shouted out, “SIZZLEAN!”

I left the taping not long after that, without even seeing the rest of the episode. No offense to the writers of Kate & Allie, but I am 100% certain that there was no joke in the entire script that was half as good as that man’s spontaneous outburst.