because sometimes you need a laugh at 10am on a Tuesday morning:

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*-Yeah, Yeah….that’s not The Grey that’s (probably) Taken (which I’ve only seen in fits and starts on hotel HBO). One Liam Neeson badass movie is as good as another, and infinitely better than a Liam Neeson as wise but doomed mentor film any day.

These are things I saw on the internet and elsewhere over the last couple of days:

♦-John Scalzi opens up an interesting window into the mind of the undecided voter; at least those undecided voters who self-select by reading one particular science fiction author’s web site. The comments are interesting reading.

♦-A meditation on the inherent dichotomy of the rich, conservative Springsteen fan, courtesy of Sarah Jaffe.

♦-Elizabeth and the fine folks at Dark Cargo have been turning out some really good stuff lately: witness nrlymrtl‘s take on the age old debate about the relative worthiness of books and their film adaptations.

♦-Carrie Vaughn laments the lack of GIJOE this weekend, spends some time pondering copycat film advertising and the whole objectification (of men and women) thing regarding both film advertising and Magic Mike (which has been everywhere the last week or so, leading me to point out to twitter about how “somebody spilled Tatum all over everything”.

♦-As I watched my netflixed copy of Burke and Hare (an execellent film featuring Simon Pegg, Andy Serkis, and Jessica Hynes) the other evening, I was treated to the trailer for Saint, a gloriously strange Dutch horror film about a muderous St. Nicholas (along with, I suspect, a more-sinister-than-usual Black Peter) slaughtering children when December 5 falls under a full moon. The spouse and I immediately notified Creepy Christmas expert Jonah Knight, and added it to our netflix instant queue. I suspect we’ll be watching it this evening.

I really hope Krampus makes an appearance. Not culturally appropriate, but in this case, I hope the rule of awesome wins out.

♦-Also there were some storms in the area (which only knocked out our power out for a couple of hours for once, though several friends remain in the dark), and there was also an obscure decision by the Supreme Court about a law or something, which the media gave almost no attention to.

Rather than ride my usual NoVA trails this afternoon after work, I tried someplace new. Turns out there’s a small National Park just a short drive up the road from my office neighborhood, Great Falls Park in lovely McLean, VA.

It’s situated along the Potomac River as it “builds up speed and force as it falls over a series of steep, jagged rocks and flows through the narrow Mather Gorge” (to borrow the copy from the web site linked above). The falls are the main attraction, but there are remnants of the historical Patowmack Canal (used to ferry goods around the falls) and a visitors center with information about the history of the area (which sadly, was closed by the time I got there).

In any case, if you’re curious, I shot a bit of video of the Falls, which I present here. They’re rather pretty, and look really imposing without much sense of scale (the actual drop is about 80 feet):

I visited the park, because it contains several miles of hiking and biking trails, which anonymous folks on the internet say are some of the best mountain biking in the area (although the most popular trail has only limited access right now due to erosion from the high water caused by recent rain).

Still, It was close, and I wanted to take a look, and I wasn’t sure I was entirely ready for the really difficult trails – I’ve been putting mostly road and improved trail miles behind me this season, and don’t quite have my wilderness legs under me. I put about eight miles of the Carriage Road and Ridge trails behind me, with more uphill sections than I expected, but I managed to push through it, but I felt every bit of the going up. I’ve become too used to relative flatness.

Near the beginning of my ride, I had an encounter with a resident:

This little deer didn’t seem to mind me much at all as I pedalled along. As I stopped to take a few photos, she actually approached me, to the point where I thought she was getting a little too friendly. I had to actually shoo her away after a while. I suspect people are feeding the wildlife (although they’re not supposed to).

This was the fourth National Park I’ve visited this year, which isn’t a bad total for June. It’s also the second park I’ve been to in the last week, since, as you’ve probably figured based on previous posts, the whole pack of us spent a couple of days in Tennessee visiting Great Smoky Mountains National Park last weekend. It was very nice, and I will eventually post all sorts of pretty photos and describe the interesting dichotomy between the (mostly) unspoiled wilderness of the park being right next to the (totally) spoiled tourist trap (atro)cities of Pigeon Forge and Gatlinburg, TN. The problem is that all the really pretty pictures are on the real camera; all I have with me right now is my phone.

I’ll get there.

When I was in Tennessee last weekend (Oh, didn’t I mention I was in Tennessee? I’ll have to write about that one of these days…), I bought a book*. That book was AWOL on the Appalacian Trail by David Miller, a memoir of one man’s thru-hike of the AT.

I bought it because I’ve hiked a very small portion of the trail’s 2,172 miles, and look forward to doing more. I don’t know if I’ll ever do a thru-hike, but it’s one of those things that I’m maybe keen to try the next time I have five months free I’m not doing anything else with. It doesn’t seem totally unreasonable, and the idea has definite appeal to me.

In any case, I’ve just started reading it, and am really enjoying it. I’m impressed with the author’s dedication to his goal, and his honesty about his experience. I’m also appreciating the window into trail culture, a unique language and set of social conventions I’ve only gotten a small taste of in my limited time on the trail. While I’ve never hiked the whole thing (or done more than a day hikes on nearby sections), I can still empathize with Miller’s experience; his prose manages to capture the essence of being out there on mountaintops alone with your thoughts, moving between waypoints one step at a time.

Perhaps I empathized a bit too well. I read a bit before bed last night, and ended up not so much sleeping as fading in and out of a semi-conscious hallucination of walking through a slightly twisted dreamscape version of the Appalachians for a few restless hours…without the feeling of peace I normally get from spending time alone in nature. I imagine I was helped along a bit by the heat (the A/C was taking it’s time catching up to this week’s nearly 100° temperatures) or maybe by something I ate. All I know is that it was a strange and not-entirely welcome experience. Dreams are strange that way.

Also, my calves hurt. Like descending from Mary’s Rock to Thornton Gap a couple of times over hurt.

I love books, but sometimes they have strange side effects.

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* -book actually purchased in North Carolina, but that’s neither here nor there. I was straddling the state line the whole weekend.

There’s an image cropping up on the social net that, at first glance, seems to suggest that geek culture provides much better role models for girls than does mainstream media. However, as Amanda Marcotte points out, it’s a bit more complicted than that.

While the idea Kaylee and Zoe are better role models than Kardashians is unassailable, I was somewhat ill-at-ease with the image*, and with it’s suggestion that geek culture is universally celebratory and welcoming to the female point of view, because, in my experience, vast swaths of it are not.

Rather than being a Monolithic (ahem) bloc, “geek culture” is an assemblage of a wide variety of loosely-affiliated interest areas. It covers genres including fantasy, sci-fi, horror, paranormal and steampunk, and delivery mechanisms such as literature, film, comics, games of all sorts, art, and music.

Certain segments of this area are not only feminist positive, but inclusive and celebratory to all sorts of minority participation. Most fan conventions I’ve attended go out of their way to include discussions and panels relating particularly to the interests of these sub-groups. Discussions are happening, and not simply perfunctory discussions. Much of fandom goes out of it’s way to be inclusive, tolerant, and welcome to everyone who wants to participate in the shared enthusiasm for our particular interests, and the feeling of community we derive from enjoying entertainments that aren’t always mainstream. We really do enjoy and revel in our mutual assignment to the Island of Misfit Toys by mundane society.

However, not everything in our niche is so progessive. For every protagonist like Kitty Norville or Jane Sagan, there’s a Bella Swan or (the literary) Dejah Thoris. For every convention panel discussing the complicated attitudes toward gender and sexual orientation present in Heinlein’s body of work, there’s an instance of dismissive condescension toward the girl who sits down at the gaming table. For all it’s high utopian ideals, there’s a lot of sexist crap rattling around fandom. In some areas, geeks could be more welcoming. Those that don’t fit the adopted stereotype face certain challenges to entry. Ask my wife about being the “girl in the comic book store” sometime.

I think a lot of it can be attributed to the percentage of NiceGuys™ one finds within geekdom. it’s not surprising, really – clever yet unappreciated nobodies become heroes and get the girl all the time in science fiction and fantasy; it feeds a certain wish fulfillment. Combine this with benign advice from parents and sympathetic teachers about “hidden potential”** and the hard to shake middle school nerd echo chamber (“wait’ll we’re running things, then we’ll show ’em!”), and you get feelings of underdog entitlement and resentment toward the world (particularly women) who won’t fit their imagined paradigm. This is unfortunate.

Thankfully, most of us get over it, eventually. Some of us don’t. All of us, though, tend to run in similar social circles. As you can imagine, it’s not that hard to encounter what often become “teachable moments” in fandom. Sometimes these teachable moments are loud and contentious. But, in at least some cases, the ideas get through, and things get better.

So, yeah, there are problems with sexism in geek culture. Both in the media we are so devoted to, and in the social interaction when we find ourselves together in fora,There a couple of things that give me hope that things will continue to get better:

First, in terms of media, creators are writing lots of really great stuff that’s not particularly sexist, and often very progressive in terms of gender and race relations. These works are often explicitly cast as reactions to the genre’s boys club past in order to widen potential audiences.

Secondly, in terms of the culture, we geeks like to talk and argue and deconstruct things. We like looking for problems to solve. We may, as a group, have a greater than average concentration of introverts with social anxiety, but we are, above all else, passionate about our favorite things, and enjoy the company of others who do as well, even if we disagree with them

In little pockets across fandom; at gaming tables, in con panels, in line at the movies, and in internet venues all over, we’re talking about things. Sometimes, those things are relative trifles, like whether the Millenium Falcon would win a race with Serenity (and which units of measuring distance or time would be appropriate for scoring such a contest), but other times they’re of great importance, such as how we all relate to each other, and I, personally, would like to hope that as those topics come up, we’ll rise to the occasion, leading toward a fandom that’s as welcome and diverse as it aspires to be.

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* – I had a couple of problems specifically with the image. First, it’s not a good comparison when the “mundane” sample is made up of “real-life” people (or at least reality tv stars), and the sci-fi sample is made up of fictional characters. Why not populate the bottom of the chart with real-life role models like Jane Espenson, Octavia Butler, Felicia Day or Gail Simone? Secondly, Lady GaGa, besides being as geek friendly as they come, is a great role model for girls, being a prolific songwriter, talented performer, and excellent steward of her own career in the music business (with a fashion sense that’s totally in line the the average con masquerade). GaGa doesn’t belong with the rest; she’s one of ours.

** – I speak of course of “they just don’t appreciate you for who you are. You’re wonderful, they don’t know what they’re missing” and it’s ilk. In most cases, this advice has a core of truth, though it’s not particularly helpful. More practical advice would be “you’re a good and valuable person, and others might better see that if you showered regularly and wore a clean shirt. Also being a smart-assed git all the time and discounting someone’s contribution because they have ovaries is generally a bad move. Also, don’t discount the unconventionally cute geek girls who are interested in the same things you are – having common interests is important, once you actually talk to someone. Oh yeah, talk to them. They may not meet your unrealistic idealized vision, but neither does the buxom blonde you’re admiring from afar.” Is it that obvious that I speak from experience here?

Enjoy your day, kid. I’ll try to be patient with the teenager stuff.

I’ve always (and by “always” I mean “since I bothered to actually think about it”) been rather annoyed by the “everybody knows that” assumption that people grow more conservative as they get older. You know the words by now – sing along if you feel like it (this is allegedly Churchill’s version):

Anyone who isn’t a liberal by age 20 has no heart. Anyone who isn’t a conservative by age 40 has no brain.

I can report that this isn’t particularly true, at least for me (it would have to take a seriously unexpected life change on my part in the next 2.3 years for Churchill’s version to become true, anyway); and I know plenty of people in my generational cohort for whom it isn’t. I know personally, that I was a heck of a lot more conservative socially, politically and religiously in my twenties than I am as I edge into middle age. I have plenty of theories as to why (there are lots of blog posts in the archives dealing with exactly those theories, or you know, you could just ask me if you’re curious), but they’re not particularly important in this case, as much as I love to talk about them.

What I want to point to today are the results of a big survey on religion and political self-identification recently released by Trinity College in Connecticut. This study tracked the attitudes about the subject topics among members of Generation X (defined in the survey as being born between 1965 and 1972, though through personal anecdata, I expect the results wouldn’t be that different if they bumped that period out a bit to include me born two years later). The results seem to fly in the face of the societal truism exemplified by Churchill’s statement.

The big takeaway for the media is that as a group, we Gen-Xers have become less religiously affiliated and less Republican as we’ve aged. As one of the authors of the survey told the Washington Post, “Everything we find here is counterintuitive”.

Counterintuitive, unless you don’t necessarily hold with the common wisdom, or are, for example, me.

I’m not necessarily looking for validation; I’m perfectly comfortable being the aging liberal, non-traditionally spiritual hipster geek that I am, though it’s nice to have some data to point to the next time someone (usually a haughty self-satisfied Boomer or a misguided Millenial who’s suddenly decided its time to be society’s definition of a “grown up) tells me that “I’m doing it wrong” by being that aging liberal non-traditionally spiritual hipster geek.

If I really am doing it wrong (and I’m quite sure I’m not), I’m hardly alone in my efforts.

So, that’s that, other than making the attempt to wash the taste of Churchill’s drivel out of my blog by referencing a tangentially-related quotation I encountered this week from C.S. Lewis (who, Narnia’s heavy-handedness aside, was a fun and clever rabble-rouser), reacting to one of traditionalist fun-killers’ favorite scriptural bludgeons, 1 Corinthians 13:11:

Critics who treat ‘adult’ as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

There were a couple of years there where I just kind of floated, unmoored.

It’s not really that I was moored before…the tethers holding me in the place I was weren’t exactly comforting; they were confining. They felt wrong.

But, inertia is a hard thing to overcome. I got really good at justifying that where I was was where I was supposed to be…heck, I had always been there, and in my time there, I met a couple of really great people who made things seem pretty good; better than things probably were.

But, I never stopped unconsciously straining against the ropes; the currents of the universe (or more accurately, my perception of it) really didn’t want me there anymore. I don’t like the concept of “destiny” really; reality is too random for that, but I didn’t belong where I was.

There wasn’t any one big event or occurrence that finally set me adrift. It would be easier to describe things to people if there was. It was more a combination of a thousand little things: attitudes, pronouncements, difficulties in communication, vague feelings of discomfort. Whatever it was, one day the ropes holding me to the dock (to belabor the nautical metaphors) just weren’t there anymore, and I just sort of floated out of the harbor, into the vast, undefined whatever.

And I was fine, really. Mostly. I got pretty good with the uncertainty, and got *really* comfortable with the freedom to explore (or not). Something was missing, though, I guess. I didn’t really know what it was, because it wasn’t something I ever really lost or gave up when I finally made the gradual break with my personal status quo.

Oh, looking back, there were a couple of years where I had something pretty close, but that had a heck of a lot more to do with other things than it did with the “harbor”. That phase of my life passed, as phases of life do, and eventually, the feeling was lost. I never really found it again.

Until one morning a couple of years ago. How I found myself in that place, I’m not entirely sure (that’s not entirely true, but for the sake of the tone of this piece, I’m going with it, and anyway, it “feels” true). I didn’t engage, really, not right away (that’s just not the way an introvert does things), but I listened and observed (that *is* the way I do things), and I liked what I saw and heard.

The people here seemed to get me. These were people who thought about things in some of the same ways I did; it was weird, and scary, and exhilarating all at the same time. It was new. One person in particular stuck out. I can’t even remember what that person was talking about, not really; and it’s not important anyway. What is important is that it felt like the words being said were thoughts pulled right out of my brain. That intrigued me enough to stick around a while.

So I did, and before long, I was a part of it. Seems the thing I was missing was a community; not just any community, but a community where I wasn’t the odd one out by virtue of my being me. Sometimes, a few of us misfits eventually find each other and choose each other, and when we do, it’s often glorious.

Now, no community is perfect; there’s the usual weirdness that happens when you get people together in groups. Not everything clicked with me, but things were always new and interesting. However, I’m pretty sure I’ve made some friends that I’m sure will remain friends for the rest of my life, and that’s not something to take lightly.

And now, one of those friends is moving on to the next adventure in her life. It’s the nature of things – life is transition; few seekers stay in one place for long; it’s not our nature. The community, of course, will keep going, but that doesn’t mean I won’t miss this person’s presence in it.

Because one particular morning, she said some words that led me to all sorts of great things.

For that, I thank her, and wish her well.

♦ Slacktivist hits another one out of the park, this time on the subject of hate and it’s means of propogation.

♦ Most of the discussion surrounding the recent rumors about Marvel making a Black Panther movie revolves around casting, which makes sense (and I’m okay with pretty much any of the names floating about). What bothers me is the idea that a Black Panther movie somehow rules out the eventual existence of a Luke Cage: Power Man movie. Sweet Christmas, people, it’s not a zero-sum game. I think the universe (either the real one or the Marvel movie one) has enough room for more than one black superhero, don’t you?

♦ This week’s Savage Love hits on both reasons why I never miss Dan Savage’s column: The first letter ably captures the weird, silly, and oddly plausible, and the second is the perfect example of execellent advice to a common but often unmentioned problem, delivered simply and bluntly, with both humor and honesty.

♦ Finally, I shall never grow tired of this underappreciated meme:

The last few days have been very trying for me, physically and emotionally. Don’t worry, I’ll pull through, but don’t get concerned if it looks like I’m maintaining radio silence – I am, but only because I need some time to hide away in an undisclosed location and recharge.

before I go, though, I wanted to touch upon a couple of pleasant highlights from a period that was otherwise pretty damned stressful:

First, I had the honor of playing a small part in figuratively throwing a couple of pretty great teenagers over the bridge to “adulthood” (whatever that means) this weekend. I’ve spent a good part of the past year playing at being an advisor and mentor of sorts, and have been continually impressed with their engagement, energy, ideas, and humor (as well as their general tolerance of my old-fogieness). They’re both way more prepared to take on the world than I was at that age, and I can’t wait to see what they do next. Congratulations on the milestone, E and J.

Also this weekend, I spent a couple of hours with some of the Richmond Comix Encounters group running through the open playtest of “D&D Next”. There’s a new version of the iconic pen & paper RPG in the works, and the playtest is a chance for the publishers to put a “rough draft” version in the hands of a population of gamers in order to see how it works in “real world” conditions, who then report back with their experiences and findings. Essentially, it’s what I do for my real job, but this time, I get to try and break fun stuff instead of dry business software.

As for the experience? It was terribly enjoyable. The new rules play a lot like the very early editions of the game, making it much different than the current 4th edition. The table was largely made of up a experienced grognards who’ve been playing for decades, and we all spent a lot of time looking at each other with smiles on our faces talking about how “old school” it all felt and how it was tripping our nostalgia circuits, opening up memories of middle school afternoons around some kid’s kitchen table, sneaking the rogue around corners while balancing resources. It required a tremendous shift in thinking after playing 4E for the last half-decade. Thankfully, they’ve worked in enough modern tweaks to ensure that a first level wizard isn’t totally useless after expending his single daily spell slot.

That’s not to say that the system is perfect just yet – there’s a lot of rough around the edges, and some things that are contradictory or don’t work quite right; things like how to run surprise rounds, and exactly how some of the new healing rules work, for example. I’m already a big fan of the “advantage/disadvantage” mechanic, though – it adds an interesting wrinkle to the proceedings. I’m looking forward to the next iteration to see how they refine things, and so I can learn more about character creation. But mostly, I want to try out the new “intoxicated” condition to see how it plays.

And with that, I’m going to go hide under my blanket for a couple of days.