H'mmm...someone didn't get the Red Ryder BB Gun when they were a tyke

Nov 26, 2001

Kids like this aren’t nerds. They aren’t dweebs. They aren’t “fairy dorkfaces”. They’re KIDS.

I’d be far more concerned if I saw this behaviour in a large swath of the adult population. (Or maybe I’d be relieved for a while. It would stop them from playing with bombs.)

Besides, as the article’s author points out, the four Harry Potter books can only last for so long. That’s a trend with a rather short shelf life (unlike, oh, say, Pokemon, Beanie Babies, Tamagochi, Star Wars, Star Trek, or golf.)

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Abuse is such a flexible word...sadly enough.

Nov 26, 2001

All these Internet porn laws really make my teeth itch. In broad principle, they’re rather nice: do something to make the Internet a less child-unfriendly place. But how do you define “child-unfriendly”? What is porn, and what is not? Who gets to decide? And when did groups like the Southern Baptist Convention get the right to decide how other people’s children will be raised?

It seems to me that this really is a two sided problem, though. On one side, yes, the folks who send all the porn-smut through the email should be tracked down and more harshly penalised (like, oh, I don’t know, banned from using any Internet-connected computer for a minimum of five years is a start). And yes, the folks who use the teaser-images on porn sites should be forced to follow similar signage laws as real-world sex shows and shops, with like penalties for breaking the law. However, these outraged parents have to take responsibility for teaching their children how to build a value system. Sooner or later, children leave home. Some of them REALLY leave (i.e., moving from a town of 26,500 to a metro area of 1.4 million). If parents don’t equip their children to make their own judgements, stand up for their principles, and adhere to their own moral code, then parents haven’t done as well as they could. It seems to me that parents have a near-prime opportunity when their child views Internet porn. The kids are surrounded by a stable, supportive atmosphere. They are warm and dry. They have food to eat. They know that the people in their home love them (or they should…but that’s another rant). They’re not trying to eke out a living on the streets, spending each night hungry and cold. They’re not being physically attacked every day (again…another rant). They haven’t done anything that will get them thrown in jail. They haven?t even, technically, done anything that anyone else will ever know about. It’s a relatively consequence-free zone, so the children can concentrate on the lessons that the parents teach them.

Think about it: when would you rather discuss drugs with your child, around the dinnertable one day or one evening at the local police station? When would you rather discuss sex, in in your living room after school or in the hospital or police station after your child has been raped? If parents keep abnegating their rights, other people will raise their children. (To the troglodyte sitting at the screen while their children dismember the family dog “in fun”: That’s you, screwhead.)

Related entry: Isn’t Child Abuse Illegal?
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Originally by John Scalzi. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

Nov 25, 2001

Chocolate is God’s way of reminding men how inadequate they are. I am vividly confronted with this fact every time my wife and I go out to a restaurant. When it gets to dessert, my wife usually orders the most chocolate-saturated dessert possible. It’s the one called “Unstoppable Double-Fudge Chocolate Mudslide Explosion” or some such thing. I always wonder why anyone would want to eat anything that promises a catastrophic natural disaster in your mouth.

The dark brown monstrosity arrives at the table, and my wife takes the first bite. Before the fork is even removed from her mouth, a small moan escapes her lips. Her eyes, previously perfectly aligned, first cross slightly and then faze completely, pupils dilating in pure chocolate pleasure before the eyelids clamp down in ecstasy. The hand not holding the fork clenches into a fist and starts pounding the table. The silverware rattles.

After about six minutes of this, she finally manages to swallow the bite, realign her eyes, and take the next shuttle back from whatever transcendental plane she’s been visiting. Slowly, her sphere of consciousness expands to include me, her husband, her life-long mate, her presumed partner in all things ecstatic.

“Hey, this is pretty good,” she’ll say. “You want some?”

No, I don’t. I want nothing to do with an object that does to my wife in one bite what I’ve worked for an entire relationship to achieve. It wouldn’t do any good, anyway. Men just don’t have the same relationship with chocolate that women do. It’s not even close. I wandered around the office today and asked men — “Chocolate. Your thoughts?” — and the result was always the same. First, a confused look as to why they’re being asked about something so trivial, and then some lame, obvious statement “Uh…it’s brown?”

Ask women the same question, and you get responses like “The ONLY food group,” “ESSENTIAL to life as we know it,” and the ultimate casual swipe at every member of the Y-chromosome brigade, “better than sex.” Ouch. Some women will try to make up for that last one by quickly adding that chocolate is supposed to be an aphrodisiac.

Uh-huh. Chocolate certainly increases desire; problem is the desire is usually for more chocolate. The best a guy can do is buy a box of chocolates and hope he’ll be considered somewhere between the cherry truffle and the strawberry nougat.

Don’t get me wrong. Guys like chocolate just fine; it’s just not essential to life as we know it. Respiration is essential to life as we know it; chocolate is simply one of those nice little bonuses you get. We won’t usually pass it up if it’s offered, but I don’t know too many guys who would get substantially worked up if it were to suddenly disappear from the face of the earth (ironic in a way, as back in the days of the Aztecs, only men were allowed to have the stuff). When I eat a chocolate dessert, I enjoy it, yes. My world view doesn’t narrow to include only the plate that it’s on.

Maybe we’re missing something. On the other hand, we don’t have to pick up our silverware from the floor after we’re done with our tiramisu. Life is about trade-offs like that. All I know is that come Valentine’s Day, chocolate will be among the things I offer my wife. I can’t truly appreciate it, but I can truly appreciate what it does for her. Which is close enough.

[Ed: I found this one day, and knew I really wanted to reprint it. I contacted the author, who graciously said that yes, I could reproduce it on my site. So if you, like me, want to have your own copy, ask the author. He’s very nice that way. Good on him.

And pass the chocolate.

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Something to do with those NaNoWriMo projects.

Nov 23, 2001

I may have an idea of what to do with my nanowrimo project when I finish: turn it into a shareware novel and make it available. I hadn’t totally thought out this concept, though others have set these up. It has some drawbacks, true; but then again, it definitely takes advantage of that direct-to-customers marketing jazz that the e-tailers keep yammering about (yet never seem to actually grok.)

That site, BTW, houses all sorts of good writing, not just the shareware novel. Check it out. Laugh. Cry. Fall down. Make it a part of you. The end.

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