#its not that people are lazy. it's that our standards are too goddamn high

[hemi-demi]

Not my usual post but something I've been thinking about lately.

I think a part of what bothers me the most about the AI generated images/writing/etc debate is folks claiming that they need it because of a lack of talent and skill. Even going so far as to call it an accessibility device.

Which, as a disabled person, boils my blood. Because I think where this comes from is not in the same way as like a curb-cut levels things out for everyone. It's based on impossible standards in literally every piece of media we consume, and I think that's something we can change, rather than forcing people to use a bland device to meet the rest of the world at their level.

Folks are telling themselves they need AI images because becoming an artist takes time, and money, and effort. Some disabled folks don't have the dexterity to hold a pen, or can't sit upright at a computer for hours (me), or can't process visual information in the same way as others. Those are all true statements.

Same with writing. Dyslexia and other learning disorders can make writing intimidating. People receive harsh judgement for things like having poor sentence structure or spelling, even if you as a reader still know exactly what they mean.

The solution to these issues is not "pay an AI company to steal from other creators so everything washes into the same, boring grey blob of creativity". It's make bad art.

I want to see people's art where they don't have a full grasp of anatomy, but try their best anyway. I want to see stories where someone might struggle with visualizing a scene, but they do their best to convey the meaning in whatever way they can. I want to see more people comfortable with posting less than perfect work, and being proud of it because they made it. Or not even feel the need to post at all, because at the end of the day, the little numbers on your screen will never be the most satisfying part of creating. (Telling myself this as well, tbh. It's hard, I get that.)

If everyone is equally good at creating work, then there's never any variety. You can learn just as much, if not more so, from bad art than good. You can find beauty in it, unique ideas or habits that others have dropped because they were told it wasn't proper. You can see pure creative expression, without being chained to traditional conventions taught in school that beat all the fun out of you to make your work marketable.

We're taught in school that other artists are our competition, so of course people are turning to these tools to try and get a leg up. They never learned what a collaborative art or writing community can look like, and how that actually helps you grow as an artist more than AI or self isolation ever could.

If someone is drawing their entire lives, and never gets any more skilled at it for one reason or another, there's nothing wrong with that. That art is just as valid, and just as beautiful.

I understand that people feel this pressure to stand out in a sea of artists who worked their asses off to get where they are, but turning all art and writing into this regurgitation of what has worked before will never bring new ideas into the world in the same way a bored kid with a pencil and notebook paper can. It just won't.

[realisaonum]

book meme

thank you, jen @det395​ !! i feel like this meme got away from me a bit, but no shame! i love talking about books and writing so onward ~under the cut~

1- how many books are too many books in a series? 

mhmmmmm i guess it depends on the objective of the series, right? is the plan to have x number of books in the series and if so, when we finally get to the end will it be satisfying considering all the books we’ve read leading up to it? OR is the objective of the premise / characters just to exist doing whatever? both can be done well. i would say a lot rides on how much i trust the author.

2- what do you think about cliffhangers?

so this is meant for cliffhangers in a series like between books? i don’t really care if there’s a cliffhanger as long as i have the next book sitting right next to me. otherwise uh, only if the wait between books is tolerable, because at that point you need to know that the author can clear this mess up, right? there’s this other thing, like you know how if the entire series was already written, then they might release the books a month apart or a quarter apart - that could be alright too. but years in between? not especially a fan. is anyone a fan?

3- hardback or paperback?

jen, you and me are complete opposites here. paperbacks stress me out. i will go out of my way to buy a used hardcover if given the choice. of course, there are some publications i don’t mind in paperback —thinking poetry and super indie books that don’t have a hardcover release OR books where the spines are thin enough they won’t break and i won’t be holding them long enough for them to wear. hardcovers are sturdy and i don’t have to worry i’ll accidentally bend the cover in some damaging way. I am invested in keeping my books nice to the point that i create covers for my books out of kraft paper or brown grocery bags while i am reading them. this is something i started when i was in college and didn’t want these books i was hoping to probably resell get thrashed coming in and out of my bag for all these classes. My home library is probs more half and half paperback/hardcover but if given a choice usually it’s hardcover.

4- least favourite book?

i think it’s good to at least attempt to meet a book on its level. there are lots of books i didn’t like, but i wasn’t meeting them on their level and i know that so we’re ignoring those. i do however have a shelf on my goodreads dedicated to books that i have beef with so i’ll just go off on two of them.....

tana french’s the likeness for being plagiaristic shit. it is essentially poorly concealed alternate universe OC insert fic of the secret history. you’ve got french’s dublin murder squad folks and then this group they are investigating who bear a STRIKING resemblance to the greek students in tsh 🤔. this would be one thing. it is pretty well acknowledged that nothing is original and there are enough changes to The Likeness that MAYBE i could let it slide if not for this other thing: french’s book, the likeness, has lines that are just basically reworded quotes from the secret history and french positions these lines so they are said by the counterpart (essentially same!) character that gave them original life in tsh. i cannot stress this enough: you can HEAR how similar the sentences are and their core intent is always the same. it’s thinly veiled theft! it astounds me that French hasn’t been sued frankly. it is one thing to want to capture some of the genius that tartt’s debut novel holds, but it is completely lazy and disgusting theft to go about it in the way French did with this book. and YES the secret history was published before french’s book. if i could stomach how fucking goddamn boring the likeness was to read it a second time and cite every one of these offenses i would, but that’s yet a third strike against it—it’s too boring to be worth it. 

T. Kingfisher’s second book of the Clocktuar War duology : The Wonder Engine. this is a book that i feel violated the contract between writer and reader. the first book feels almost like a YA book. the stakes while described as very high are treated, as actions unfold, as very low. nothing truly irreparable happens until the climax of the second book and the fallout of that action is so off-tone of everything that came before i felt deeply betrayed. no, like, completely betrayed as in it ruined the rest of my afternoon, i am still viscerally angry eight months later, and i will never trust this author again. sure, maybe none of those actions that led to the climax were out-of-character, but there was nothing NOTHING in the proceeding action that even came close to that level of consequence. it’s a pity because right up till that point i was having a really good time. the entire vibe of the rising action to the climax of book one all the way through the rising action of book two was just a quippy fun version of roadtrip/quest - it felt like a comfort read. the abrupt tone shift had all the subtlety of dropping a graphically, brutal murder into Blue’s Clues. you don’t do that - this is a basic tenet of a writer / reader relationship. i’m not touching this bitch’s shit again.

5- Love Triangle, yes or no?

not so much. i like jen before me will scream ‘just be poly.’ love triangles that lead into poly relationships? yes, awesome will be glad i read. but i am at a stage in my life where your standard will-they-won’t-they-love-triangle is just fucking pointlessly frustrating to me. an example: i read a Nic Stone’s book Odd One Out a couple years ago and something about the synopsis or the hype made me think that it would resolve the love triangle that way, so when that did not happen i was incredibly frustrated and immediately wanted to resell the book. it’s the potential of the thing. stone’s book could have been the perfect vehicle for opening up the concept of polyamory to a ya audience but instead just really squandered that potential with weak floundering — in my opinion!

6- the most recent book you just couldn’t finish

uhhhhh i’ve got two and i’m not sure i’ve entirely given up quite yet buuuuuuuut 

fucking dune. i got really pissed off with this book. So just…setting aside the whole vaguing at a pedophilically inclined queer coded villain - it’s done so poorly, that it's almost funny? like it doesn’t (as of half way through) actually have any consequence on…anything at all and is tacked on like an afterthought to the end of his scenes. honestly it all could just be cut out entirely with no recourse to the larger story. So my actual beef with this book is the pacing is ATROCIOUS. like yo, not only do you expect me to give a shit about these Atreides cunts, when we just met them and we spend the same amount of time with them IF NOT MORE with the antagonist? but you also expect me to believe Paul was able to just convince the leader of the Arrakis people —the leader of an entire planet!!— with a single fucking sentence??? yeah, not so much. it was not set up for me to believe that Paul could do that! maybe if Kynes hadn’t died immediately after—or at least not died at that moment? baring the fact I thought he was by far the most interesting character, IF he had been convinced by Paul in that scene, it would have been great to see some actual work done around that - with a transfer or a liaise of power between Kynes and Paul and the Fremen. By not having any substantive scene that does it - it begs the question of what the fuck was the point of the character in the first place? unplumbed potential!!! over all there seem to be some key scenes missing to get the reader to where the narrative expects us to be? but the choices made of the characters we spend time with and the moments we see with them, the benefit to the larger story…is not always there. hey herbert, these words you have written aren’t doing what you want them to?? i feel like i should finish it but i reaaaaallly don’t want to :) the only thing i can say is it looks like from the trailer, villeneueve is giving space to these moments so that the viewer can foster a genuine connection with the characters? radical concept.

our lady of perpetual hunger - i started this one optimistically bc i like chef memoirs, but i am at the point where she has just given birth to her son and honestly DON’T CARE. i still haven’t officially given up on it yet since i actually fucking bought it like a dope. i certainly would not have if i knew how much NOT about working the line this was gonna be

7- book you are currently reading

Aside from the failures mentioned above, I am working on the second book in B. Catling’s Vorrh trilogy, The Erstwhile. Also very close to finally finishing Iain Sinclair’s The Last London - there’s a review of his work from the LA Times that goes “One of Sinclair’s greatest skills has always been his ability to take diverse if not chaotic source material and refashion it in a way that sometimes seems downright alchemical” which captures some of the wonder I experience when reading his work. His style and how he creates atmosphere and setting is just unique and astounding.

8- last book you recommended to someone

The Secret History by Donna Tartt. Before that I told my brother to read Eat a Peach, as we both love Anthony Bourdain and David Chang talks about him a bit here, plus it’s just a fucking great book. any book that gives insight into Chang’s methodology and paradigm is worth a shot.

9- oldest book you read

I think it might have to be Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (which apparently according to wiki premiered on the stage a whole four months before Hamlet so that’s what we’re going with) and if plays don’t count, I don’t care. I think they count and that’s what we’re going with.

10- the most recent book you read ?

Given the previous question, the most recently published book, right? It’s gotta be the one I just finished: The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic - Revised and Expanded edt., which like just came out this summer. I watched Jessica Hopper’s promo zoom, curtesy of my local indie bookstore, and went ahead and bought it. This was a great decision! It was just what I needed to read these last couple of weeks. i love there’s lots of short pieces that made the read quick and the fact that it’s non-fiction so there was no pressure of a plot or the emotional weight of character investment when I had a lot of big stressors dragging me down irl -it was such a relief. Hopper’s criticism is fun to read and there’s some real art in her appreciation of music here.

11- favourite author?

These are the top in a kind of order but not really: Donna Tartt, Jeff VanderMeer, Megan Whalen Turner, Flannery O’Conner, Chuck Palahniuk, Anthony Bourdain

Other faves very much worth mentioning: Emily O’Neill, Richard Siken, Brandon Sanderson, Warren Ellis, Nathan Englander, Stephen King, Eddie Huang, Carl Hiaassen, Anne Carson, and Iain Sinclair.

12- buying books or borrowing books?

Depends on if my library has it, of course! I nearly always see if my library has a copy first if i have never read it or the author before. If i’ve read the book before or trust the author, I’ll buy it. Like I’ll straight out buy new stuff from Jeff VanderMeer even though with him it’s either this-hits-exactly-and-is-my-new-fave or i-really-disliked-this-but-admire-the-boundaries-you’re-pushing-my-dude - so it’s always a gamble but a worthy one.

12- a book you dislike that everyone else seems to love

a little life (just bc it's torture porn elevated to art doesn’t negate the fact that it’s torture porn. Yanagihara’s project here is repugnant and the fact that this book is lauded as moving lgbt fiction makes my skin crawl)

sharp objects (good writing, compelling story, BUT typographical scarification doesn't work like that - i am not going to get into it but i know from first hand experience how Flynn described it is not accurate)

nesbø’s the snowman (what kinda dumbass detective would think THAT when a woman finds her missing father’s corpse? absolute idiocy - so obviously reverse engineered with that end in mind)

the raven cycle (fuck ronan lynch to start and then fuck him to end as well - there’s some other stuff but mostly he’s a total CUNT and if i don’t say that once a day i have probably died)

14 - bookmarks or dogears?

Bookmarks and sticky notes. Then I can place it pointing directly to the paragraph I last stopped on.

15- The book you can always reread?

This is my question because I reread all the time. ALL THE TIME. Books I reread often: The Secret History, Medium Raw (especially chapter 17 The Fury), Crooked Kingdom, The Violent Bear It Away, and The Goldfinch. Every year like clockwork (since it came out apparently) I will reread Stephen King’s The Outsider.

Other books I feel the urge to reread: VanderMeer’s Acceptance, Englander’s Dinner at the Center of the Earth, Frazier’s Nightwoods, Fresh Off the Boat, the Mr. Mercedes trilogy, the Peter Grant Series (which is queued up for another go here soon I think), any of the stories from A Good Man is Hard to Find, Sanderson’s Wax and Wayne Mistborn books, simon vs the homosapiens’ agenda, and there are two of Alan Morinis’ books on Mussar that I am technically always revisiting—when i need a reminder, i’ll jump around and read specific sections to get centered again.

16- can you read while listening to music?

Yes, but only ambient or near ambient (only usually one track on repeat) or a soundtrack I am extremely familiar with. No new music. I do usually need some audio stimulation or my mind will wander terribly.

17- one POV or multi POV?

Multi pov can certainly be done well (looking at the soc duaology and VanderMeer’s Acceptance) but working a multi-pov means there are more plates spinning, it’s more of a challenge, and some authors pull it off better than others.

18- do you read book in one sitting or in multiple days?

I don’t really do this anymore. that might have something to do with me picking up thicker books? but also i have a full time job now and let’s be real the book has to be hella good if i don’t want to put it down. the last book i attempted to shotgun was the final installment of my favorite series and it still took me two days so....i can get through a lot of books but none of them are ever in one sitting anymore.

19- who to tag:

@sybilius​ @mouth-rainboy​ @iwonderifthatisart​ @phereinnike​ @magnificentmoose​ @wambsgangs​ @moriarteaparty​ and anyone else if you feel so inclined!

Bonus Question: What’s on your to-read shelf? 

As for me, I am excited about one i just picked up, Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines, which i might start tomorrow and I will be taking Paul Madonna’s Come to Light on my trip to see my brother this coming weekend. 

[portugalisinsa]

In my desperate attempt to sleep I ended up thinking about copaganda and how the term as been abused and misused, so let me rant about it for a little bit

So “copaganda” means a specific thing, namely, a piece of media that pushes propaganda for the police, implying that the police is Great, Actually, and Don’t Worry Your Pretty Little Head About It. Cops is an example of that. Blue Bloods is the poster child.

However, as it always happens, a specific term that is actually Important enters the mainstream and loses its meaning because of people, and now it’s being used by many as “movie and/or show that’s about the police and/or has a police character that isn’t a total dick, which obviously means that the movie and/or show is bad”.

That’s obviously bullshit, and I will show that with Edgar Wright’s great masterpiece Hot Fuzz.

On the surface, a complete dumbass would say that Hot Fuzz is copaganda. Nicholas Angel is shown as good! The final act is a big shooting! Of course it is, right?!

Wrong.

Alright, so, Hot Fuzz begins by showing us Nicholas Angel and how fucking awesome he is. There’s what you would expect (urban pacification, riot control, resolution of “Operation Crackdown”, highest arrest) but, most notably, there’s a degree in Politics and Sociology, and they specifically mention popularity within the community. In fact, in the rest of the movie, that is what he mostly does- community work. He checks the traffic, patrols, gets minors out of a pub, and tries to find a duck for a member of the public.

So Nicholas Angel is awesome, and he’s the best cop. it would naturally follow that the rest of the police would love him. That’s what we want- if you’re good, you meet your objectives, and do your best, you will fit in the police and make the world a better place!

But no, the others fucking hate him. His superiors are shipping him off because he’s too good. He’s making the others look bad, and the idea of, you know, holding everybody at a higher standard doesn’t touch them. No, Nicholas Angel makes them look bad, and looking good matters more than all the results he gets.

Now, it would be easy to make it look like it’s just a higher up problem. The higher up are lazy and image obsessed, but the common officers, the ones we all meet, they’re good and appreciate him. “Don’t worry, public, we’ll protect you even though our superiors are dicks.“

Nope, they fucking hate him too.

So already, not a glowing endorsement of the police. But hey! It could still be copaganda! Maybe, I don’t know, it’s just those city cops, and the country cops are actually the good guys!

Ahah lol, actually? The country cops fucking hate Angel too. Angel is a “city cop” who thinks too highly of himself and is there to show them how it’s done.

If you’re reading this, you may remember that Angel kinda never did anything other than, you know, be a by-the-book officer. The country cops don’t like him for completely bullshit reasons that can be summarized as “you’re new and also you’re trying to make us feel bad for not being as awesome as you by being that awesome and we don’t trust you go away”. Danny likes him, admittedly mostly because he’s a sweetie pie, but partly for the bad reasons- he wants soldier cop.

All of this is, needless to say, not a glowing endorsement of the police.

Eventually, we find out what made Angel want to become a police officer; his uncle was one. He admired him, and wanted to be like him. Now, Edgar Wright could have left it at that, and we would have had a nice, traditional “amazing cop comes from long, noble line of cops” story, but instead, we instantly find out that, actually, his uncle was corrupt, and that’s bad, and Angel is disappointed in him.

So, to recap- we’re basically halfway through the movie, and the only good cop is Angel. (Danny isn’t bad, but like... he’s not exactly good either, at least as a police officer)

The movie continues, and murders start to happen. Angel is literally the only one who thinks anything is wrong. A long, long string of “accidents” is happening, and none of the cops has even the slightest inkling that something is wrong. They’re just like “Angel, you nipped scarf, you’re a paranoid dum-dum“, and what little they do, they do after a lot of arm-twisting and with extreme disgruntlement.

Once again, not a glowing endorsement.

On and on we go, two thirds into the movie, with only Danny liking Angel and showing any kind of improvement as an officer, until we finally get to the revelation that the council is killing people for the greater good (the greater good)... Oh, and btw, who is also part of the council?

The Frank Butterman, AKA The Police Inspector, AKA THE FUCKING LEADER OF THE POLICE IN THIS TOWN.

So, to recap, by the final act of the movie, we find out that the higher ups are corrupt and the main body of the police are ineffectual.

Okay. Cool.

Nicholas Angel then proceeds to pack up for the final showdown. I see lots of people making the argument that this is an example of soldier cop, fixing everything with violence. Me, I think that’s bullshit. In real life, the problem isn’t that cops have riot gear, the problem is that they use it for everything. Riot gear is something you use only when strictly necessary, and I would argue that “murderous council that’s packing” is one of those times when it is.

So the riot gear and packing up is fine. But what about the violence, I hear you cry?

Well, here’s the thing- the man is responding with the appropriate amount of force. Everybody is trying to actually murder him, and he never, ever shoot to kill. He shoots to incapacitate.

Look at the final body count, people. You think Bad Boys would have ended such a show up with none dead, lots low-to-medium injured apart from one guy who was badly injured but did it himself by tripping on a pointy thing? Fuck, even outside of copaganda, what was the last action movie that had such a body count?

Also, the rest of the country police come around, after initially responding AGAINST Angel, and only thanks to Danny mediation. Which... I mean, good, it’s good, I’m very proud of them, but like, once again, this isn’t exactly glowing endorsement. This doesn’t scream “see, audience?!?! Cops may look ineffectual, but when push comes to shove, they’ll save you!” to me, this screams “yo, they’re finally doing the bare minimum”.

Anyway, the end comes. The London police wants Nicholas Angel to come back because now they look bad, but Angel wants to actually rebuild and direct the police here in the town. They all do paperwork, because that’s what the rules say and rules are important and cops should follow the rules, and more stuff happens but it’s not important for the purpose of this so, here, the end.

At the end, we get the song. The choice of music is important for a movie, it means stuff. Even a mediocre director knows that, and Edgar Wright is a goddamn master of the craft. Have  you seen The World’s End? Check that soundtrack. It’s perfect. Hell, the man directed Baby Driver, which, you know, was half soundtrack. Edgar Wright cares about music in his movies and he chooses it carefully, is the point, okay?

So, keeping in mind that, what do we end Hot Fuzz with? Some bombastic “bad boys bad boys, whatchu gonna do, whatchu gonna do when they come for you”? Something that pumps you up, that makes you go “FUCK YEAH”?

We end it with “Caught by the Fuzz”, by Supergrass. Which, yes, slaps, it slaps my whole bod, and yes, it does pump you up, but, once again, is not a glowing endorsement of the police. It’s a song from the point of view of a scared teen having been arrested by the police who is thinking “fuck I should have stayed at home fuck”.

So what am I trying to say with this? Well, let’s start with what I’m not trying to say; I don’t think Hot Fuzz is an indictment of the police. Please don’t take all of this as me saying that Edgar Wright intended Hot Fuzz as a giant ACAB. That is what in the field we call a reach. Hot Fuzz isn’t an indictment of the police, and that’s fine, because it’s not trying to be. It’s showing the police as a highly flawed institution, and sure, it’s not showing it as flawed as it actually is, but that’s fine, because it’s not trying to be The Wire. What it is trying to be is a fun action movie, which it is, and it is so amazingly.

What I am trying to show is that it’s not copaganda. It’s a movie with a police officer as a main character, a main character who is awesome, but it isn’t copaganda. It’s not endorsing the police. It’s not whitewashing it. It isn’t saying “look at the police, aren’t they great? Aren’t we glad the police are around? Aren’t we better because of the police? Don’t you want to become a police officer? Don’t you think that what they do is excusable, at the end of the day, since they deal with so much?”

But what does this have to do with copaganda? So, look. I get that it’s very nice to tell other people that their favourite shows and/or movie is bad AND wrong, and to feel like you have the moral high ground while doing so. I also get that words change and at the end of the day who gives a shit about it. I really do get that- I will never, ever give a shit about ‘literally’ being used as an intensive and not just to mean ‘literally’, for example.

BUT, some words are actually important, because they do mean a very, very specific thing they are best at describing. And “copaganda” is important, because you read it, you hear it, and you instantly know what it means; it’s something that’s also cop propaganda. Got it.

Which means it’s a word that is important to try and keep for as long as possible, because, you know... the cops aren’t always great. And it’d be best if we weren’t constantly told they are.

I understand that it feels bad to have so many bad things happening around us, and so little power to stop it. But you do have a little bit of power. You have the power to call a spade a spade, and to say ‘that isn’t cool’.

Calling a spade a spade, however, means that you don’t go around calling everything a spade. If you call everything a spade, it creates confusion, and dilutes a message.

So please. Please.

Instead of just pointing at something that has a cop in it and say “copaganda!”, use your critical skills and, like I just did with Hot Fuzz, try to find out if it actually is copaganda before saying it is so.

[ms-demeanor]

After reading your "ultra-long postivity post", now I have kind of a weird feeling because i relate a lot to pretty much everything you said, but i ended up approaching the "not everyone can x" from the opposite side, being the "gifted kid" teachers used to hold everyone to unrealistic standards (that i knew most couldnt achieve in the given timeframes), and now i get frustrated when i dont develop skills immediately, because i have done it before and feel like i should be able to and aaaaaaaaaa

Funny story: when I was a kid my parents had both my sister and I tested for learning and developmental disabilities. This testing included IQ testing.

It identified that we were both “gifted” kids* and that I’m dyslexic.

It totally missed my ADHD, though!

The problem with that is that my parents. Hm.

Okay my parents both grew up in very poor families. VERY poor. And they both wanted to go to college and knew the only way that they could was through scholarships. So they became debaters. They met at a tournament in high school.

Debaters are weird. You need an efficient working memory and strong recall and the ability to think quickly on your feet. Being witty and kind of an asshole are also good traits for debaters. Basically you’ve either gotta be really fuck-off smart to be a competitive debater or you’ve gotta at least *seem* really fuck-off smart.

And my parents were champion debaters at a national level. The Whittier College debate trophy has my mom’s name written directly under Richard goddamn Nixon. My dad was on the USC debate team and competed against Harvard and won. Not only that but he ended up coaching debate for USC and Cal Tech.

So as kids who grew up in extremely poor families and were able to go to college and get middle-class jobs and buy a house because of intellectual ability my parents placed A LOT of importance on intellectual ability.

So that IQ score became a large part of my life.

First we attacked the dyslexia. The approach was basically teaching me a bunch of sight words because sounding out phonics doesn’t work when the letters get screwed up. And because I was *gifted* we did a lot of really BIG sight words.

It took about six months to get me up to speed from “memorizing the pages of a story to match the pictures because I couldn’t read along in class” to “the first book I read on my own was The Hobbit.” I guess that counted as “cured” because that was the last time I got any kind of educational assistance.

At that time I was at a gifted school, a really tiny private school that was also an after-school daycare where we did full-day classes and then did gymnastics and swim from 3-6pm. I also was there over the summer because my parents worked.

So going from “tiny private school where the teacher has you stand up in class to read your failing grade in front of everyone so that she could shame you into performing better” to “fine public school in a suburb wealthy enough to have arts programs” was a major, major change. They did an aptitude test because I was transferring in from a different district and there was much discussion about whether or not to move me directly from the second to the sixth grade.

The district refused, thank fuck.

The public elementary school didn’t *have* a gifted program so it took very little time for me to become the Certified Weird Kid. My third grade teacher had me read aloud to our class for twenty minutes a day. I taught the class the multiplication table.

When it got to be time to go to the junior high school my mom went to a meeting for the school’s gifted kids program. APPARENTLY one of the kid’s dad’s basically said “I don’t understand why you’re wasting school funds on field trips for the stupid kids, the school should spend more of its resources on kids who have a chance of actually meaning something to the world” and my mom decided that while being gifted was important it was less important than making sure I wasn’t exposed to assholes of that caliber on a regular basis.

(thanks mom, I actually do really appreciate that reprieve)

Several teachers pushed me into advanced classes - my math teacher insisted that I take the advanced algebra classes in the seventh and eighth grade.

The GATE kids *WERE* assholes and were extra bonus special assholes to me because math was the only advanced class that I was in. (At my junior high school you had to pick your elective based on what level of classes you were in - to take the GATE classes you HAD to take a music elective; if you took art, drama, shop, or home ec you couldn’t take the smart kid classes. The algebra class was a new, separate addition to the program so *some* of the kids in the “electives for dropouts” program could take algebra. Schools are really fucked up, guys, in case you didn’t know schools are really fucked up and that was BEFORE No Child Left Behind).

I got a C in that algebra class and sat in my room for literally an hour screaming at myself for being such a selfish, distracted idiot that I let myself read my books instead of studying harder for the class. (clearly very healthy, normal twelve-year-old behavior)

When it was time to go to high school my teachers made a united plea to the district to transfer me into honors/IB/AP classes.

The kids in the honors/IB/AP classes continued to be kind of awful to me. I got extremely depressed and basically started doing the lazy-but-brilliant thing of completely ignoring homework or in-class work but performing spectacularly well on tests or essays in the classes that I wasn’t catastrophically failing

I was the only person at the school who got a perfect score on the vocab part of my SAT. I was the only honors kid who hadn’t been in SAT prep classes. There was only one other kid who graduated with the same number of units as I had, we’d outstripped the valedictorian and salutatorian but three classes each. I only applied to one college - I got accepted for painting but my interviewer urged me to move to the writing program and I got accepted for that too.

My financial aid didn’t come through and my dad wasn’t willing to cosign for loans on “an art program at a trade school.”

I got accepted to Pratt Institute on their Writing for Publication track which included an internship with the New York Times for third-year students in the program.

At that point I had a Columbia Scholastic Press award for my work on my high school yearbook.

Let me tell you, the community college that I went to and spent five years variously failing and succeeding at had a fucking *killer* newspaper and magazine when I was there. The local community newspaper that hired me when I was 21 was also much better designed and edited than it had any right to be for the three years I worked there (getting paid a whole eight dollars an hour and sometimes working 20 hours straight to get it in to the printer on time).

When I transferred to the state school I got perfect grades and worked full time and won every contest offered by the school’s English Honors society (which I couldn’t join because I was a transfer student and hadn’t done honors classes my freshman and sophomore years). I started a literary magazine with some friends when I graduated; we published four full issues online before it fell apart.

You know what’s also funny?

Even the food-service job I had to pay my way though the community college I felt terrible about attending was a skills test. I was a barista, so of course for a while I was a competitive barista.

I disappointed my parents a lot. I heard a lot of “we know you’re better than this.” I got told I was too smart to be screwing up this bad. I mentioned it a couple weeks ago but my results from that IQ test got compared to my sister’s and that was the justification for holding me to a higher standard. “You’re measurably brilliant, why aren’t you acting like it?”

Here lies the corpse of a gifted kid. Look on my works ye might and despair.

I am the perfect picture of a twice exceptional gifted kid and the reason I wrote all of this out is to tell you one thing:

“Gifted Kid” is a label that someone applied to you, it has nothing to do with who and what you ARE.

It’s very, very unfair that the adults in your life used you that way. I have an exceptionally terrible memory of being singled out as the only one who passed the first test in my IB World History class; “Why is Alli the only one of all of you who is writing at grade level? You’re supposed to be the smartest kids in the school, why did you all fail?”

That’s awful for the kids around you, that’s awful for you. It doesn’t do anybody any favors if people around you are being informed that you’re setting the curve they’ll be judged against. And it really, really doesn’t do YOU any favors because it doesn’t take long *at all* for your brain to learn that that’s all you’re good for. If you aren’t the best at a thing then what’s the point, you HAVE to be best because they already SAID you were best and if you aren’t then all these other people hate you for setting a standard that even you can’t keep up with.

You end up competing with past versions of yourself and focusing on those things that make the grownups in your life praise you because the grownups in your life has praised you in such a way that it’s turned all the other kids against you.

You know who bullied the fuck out of me? The kids I taught the times tables to, the kids I read to for half an hour a day.

Those kids were MEAN to me but the teacher who told me to read Boxcar Kids to the class after lunch everyday was NICE and she told me not to worry, they were just jealous and I should be proud of my gifts.

“Anon did this in three minutes. What’s taking the rest of you so long?” - what a terrible weight to put on a child. You’re right. Not everyone can do everything.

Fucking hell.

Adults what the everloving shit is wrong with us? Please don’t treat kids like that.

Okay.

Okay.

But here’s the other thing:

If there’s any time in your life that it’s easy to acquire skills with no apparent effort it’s when you’re a child surrounded by a support system that is engaged in making sure that you can acquire those skills.

It took three adults, two dictionaries, and several hours a day to teach me enough sight-words to throw me into “look at baby genius*” territory but from my perspective as a little kid I was just reading cool stories.

I spent four hours a day in the yearbook room and ditched and failed other classes so that I could work on the yearbook. I collected hundreds of magazines to get an eye for layout. But from my perspective as a teenager it was a fun activity that I did with the closest thing I had to friends.

I’m sure that there are some skills that you had a natural aptitude for, some things that came naturally. But I’m also sure that you didn’t learn those skills with no effort, it’s just that now as an adult with a life and other shit going on it takes more effort to learn to do things.

In all likelihood you weren’t a savant who did everything perfectly the first time you tried. It just seems that way because even really smart kids don’t know when they’re bad at things and are mostly being compared against other kids (with the few rare exceptions of music prodigies or math prodigies or those kids who end up in science grad programs at 12 and boy howdy do I think there’s a whole other can of worms when it comes to the way child prodigies* interact with the world).

You wanna know what probably saved my life in the last few years?

That “anti-capitalist love notes” tumblr post.

You are worth more than your productivity.

You are worth more than your productivity.

You are worth more than your productivity.

I was actually kind of offended the first time I saw that post on my dash. “No I’m not,” I thought. “You’re only worth what you can do, everyone knows that. People care about what you do for them.”

And why the hell would I think anything else? That’s what I’d learned for pretty much my whole life.

It took me a really long time to understand that I was wrong. I matter outside of what I can do for people or how well I perform. I matter more than being able to perfectly recite poetry from memory or do calculations on command or sit down at a piano and play a piece I’ve never played by sight-reading it.

And you matter outside of that too. You’re more than your performance, you’re better than being gifted. There are people who love you for the way you make them laugh and how you listen to their stories and for the simple joy of your presence.

It’s nice to be clever, it’s handy in a lot of situations even if it does come with a lot of baggage for some people.

But god damn, it’s important to be kind.

* Personally I have issues with the way that society constructs the concepts of giftedness, genius, and prodigies. There are a lot of “gifted” kids who were the kids who scored in the top 5% of their class in school but there are also gifted kids who were doing high-level math or reading novels as toddlers; there are prodigies who showed an aptitude for music young and who were then schooled in that instrument to the exclusion of all other activities (and I bet there are a fair number of kids who might be considered prodigies if they were trained to play flute for nine hours a day and didn’t have friends but thankfully we don’t *do* that to very many people - side note, ask me my opinion about olympic athletes some time). Words like “genius” and “gifted” are very nearly meaningless and almost *never* accurately reflect skills proficiency or long-term success or are reflected in income or respect. People think that geniuses are hypercompetent robots with their shit together but literally every adult I know with a genius-level IQ is some variety or other of total fucking tire fire.

[madmaryholiday]

an incomplete list of things/media for which i have a burning, irrational hatred:

keep in mind that i’m not actually saying any of this is bad or worth hating. we just all have those weird little things we cannot fucking stand for no real good reason, and because i keep seeing some of mine all over the damn place online, i feel the need to share them.

again, not saying you should feel bad for liking any of this stuff. tbh, i’m mostly just sharing because my own irrational rage amuses me, and i think it might amuse some of you, too. here we go.

things i cannot fucking stand

spongebob: (i watched and enjoyed the first couple seasons when it first stared airing, but my tolerance for the show and related stuff has exponentially decreased over the years. which is great, since there are a lot of great spongebob-related memes out there.)

gudetama: (i honestly don’t know why i hate this thing so much. i just. cannot fucking stand it’s blobby eggy face and it’s cartoonish goddamn butt. maybe it’s because eating eggs on their own makes me sick? like i can eat fried rice and eggrolls and whatever, but just give me scrambled eggs or an omelet and i am in a world of pain. so maybe i’m just projecting.)

archer: (this is another one i can’t quite explain, except that i think i just feel like its unpleasant elements are not quite justified by its humor.)

venture bros: (same as archer, probably)

ren and stimpy: (i never was a fan of gross-out humor. like rocko’s modern life, which was around at the same time, was a bit much for me, but i felt like that was at least trying to be more clever than ren and stimpy.)

LPers who do nothing but scream during their videos: (i can tolerate some of that, but i avoid most of the biggest LPers specifically because they’re just so fucking LOUD.)

seinfeld: (just kill me now. my family loves this fucking show, and it just makes me want to fucking DIE.)

olaf from frozen: (there’s nothing inherently wrong with him, but every time i see or hear him, i want to punch him in the face.)

“edgy” puppet/muppet shit: (i liked the “don’t hug me i’m scared” stuff, but 99% of all “adult-oriented” puppet media disgusts me. i think because it’s clearly trying to be inappropriate? like we get it, dudes: it’s like sesame street but with fucking. you can stop shoving your puppet fetish in our faces anytime now.)

“edgy” stand-up comedy: (we get it. you’re a white cishet dude who gets uncomfortable around Teh Gays and likes to joke about sexual violence and the abhorrent misogynist bullshit that keeps you from maintaining a romantic relationship. you are not special, and you are not even remotely funny.)

most of my irrational hatred for these bits of media revolved around said media being loud. which isn’t a condemnation of that media, of course. there are good reasons why most of this media is so beloved. i just can’t deal with the sensory overload and/or the potential for watching that media drawing unwanted attention to myself. and i mean, that’s just me.

the last couple things, though, are just lazy comedy. i have high standards for that shit, and i don’t tolerate people who conflate “offensive” with “revolutionary.”

*

posting my old drafts cos i’m bored and i don’t want tumblr posting half-finished bullshit without me noticing.

[shirlleycoyle]

The Boy on the Mountaintop

Our subletting Funbagger Drew Magary’s third novel, Point B, was released yesterday. A reader once said Drew’s novels read like a really long answer to a Funbag question. So it is with Point B, which asks the question, “Hey, what if you could teleport anywhere you wanted, simply by using your phone?” The following excerpt provides one of many, many answers.

THE BOY ON THE MOUNTAINTOP

By Katy Wagner, GizPo

9/21/2030

(COOS BAY, OR) — Melanie Greenberg has a plan for what to do if she ever meets the Kirsch family. She's rehearsed her speech in the mirror for over a year now. Late at night, when she's mired in the private hell of insomnia, she'll jot down tweaks to her working script, each word chosen carefully for maximum impact. She's learned to write legibly in darkness; rarely does she misspell a word or write one word over another despite writing blind. She can feel the pages for indentations from where she's put pen to paper, so she can locate free white space beneath. And she has sharpened the words down to a blade, so that when she sticks them into a Kirsch, they'll leave a mark.

Can you tell me what you plan on saying?

"The words 'you killed my son' will be in there somewhere."

You think they killed him.

"I know they did. Emilia Kirsch runs the company. Jason Kirsch invented the technology. Tell me who else would be responsible."

Do you want to physically harm Emilia and Jason?

"Yes, but I know I can't. I've convinced myself it's the wrong idea anyway. I want them to live with the hell of being themselves. Emilia and Jason can stay rich. They can stay free. But they'll always have to live inside their hateful bodies, and I want that to hurt them."

It wasn't always easy to get to Coos Bay. You used to have to drive here from Portland, taking the 5 South down to Route 38 and then across to 101, a tattered ribbon of a country highway that would test even a cast-iron stomach. That slim passageway through the wild, coupled with eternally damp weather, was enough to keep Coos Bay relatively isolated in the beginning of the century, especially as shipping jobs began to dry up and drugs took hold over this otherwise anonymous bit of Oregon shoreline.

"We'd have campers and tweakers," says Greenberg. "But now you get these clusters of surfers and fishermen, all zapping in together at exact times and making a goddamn mess before zapping right back out again. And, of course, we have a few port refugees from here and there."

But the greater impact that porting has had on Coos Bay hasn't come from people bypassing the endless roads to come here, but rather its original residents leaving. When the world opened up, the youth of Coos Bay fled in droves. So many kids have dropped out of nearby Marchfield High that the school has been forced to shutter entirely.

One of the kids who dropped out was Melanie's son, Jeffrey. If you're conjuring the stereotype in your head of what a high school dropout might look like these days—lazy, disaffected, porting at random, addicted to black market opioids, etc.—Jeffrey's story will alter that image drastically. He was a straight-A student. He was lead trumpet in the school marching band. He never drank or smoked. A sophomore at Marchfield during the advent of porting, he was already receiving letters from prominent Pac-12 schools with hints of scholarship money in the offing.

"I think, in some ways, porting has been worse for the smart kids," Melanie tells me. I'm in her house right now. It's a split-level abode nestled deep in the woods. This is an area that gets little port traffic, although that hasn't stopped Melanie from keeping dozens of guns handy to fend off aggressive trespassers and would-be squatters. She makes me a fresh pot of coffee but, in a moment of absent-mindedness, forgets to put a filter in the coffeemaker. Hot water and loose grounds spurt all over the kitchen counter.

"Jeffrey wanted to leave Coos Bay, and I don't blame him. I mean, this place was a meth hole. He was excited to get out and see the world, and I was excited for it, too. I just think you have to be ready, you know? No one was ready for it."

She held off buying Jeffrey a PortPhone for as long as she could, but after he saved up hundreds from his own personal landscaping business, she couldn't fend him off any longer.

"I remember where he ported to first," Melanie says to me as she rinses the soaked coffee grounds out of her pot and puts in a fresh filter. "It was Cancun, which is predictable for a 16-year-old. I made him promise only to go for a couple of minutes. So he zaps out, and I'm waiting, and waiting, and I've got half a mind to go to his pin and thrash him in front of all of Mexico. Then he finally came back."

And what was that like?

"He wouldn't stop laughing. That ever happen to you? You're so happy you start laughing, and you don't know why? It was that. And I saw that look of joy from him and…" she begins to cry, "I'm a mom, you know? When you see your kid happy, you want them to stay that way forever. It's like when you give a small child candy, and they go crazy for it. It makes you want to give them more. To spoil them. Because it's so easy. Spoiling them makes them happy. But you know you can't spoil them always because if you keep giving candy to them, it'll…" She can't finish the thought. She presses her hands against the counter and lets out a long exhale.

Jeffrey began porting every weekend, and then every night. Once PortSys began offering unlimited plans, Melanie felt powerless to stop him. He always managed to talk his way out of having the phone confiscated. Sometimes they would port together places, but more often it would be Jeffrey out in the world on his own, Melanie dying a little inside every time he vanished.

"Everything was different overnight, and I needed more time to adjust to that. We all did. We all still do! But PortSys? They never gave a shit. They weren't careful. They didn't bother preparing anyone for this kind of world. They charged ahead because they knew no one would ever have the courage to stop them."

One Sunday in May, Jeffrey told his mom he was going to Los Angeles with fellow bandmate Paul Gallagher. They had an agreement that he would share his pin with her anytime he went somewhere. This day, the destination was the Santa Monica Pier. Melanie watched Jeffrey port out, then ported to Atlanta herself to visit a friend before coming home to wait for him.

But Jeffrey never showed. Melanie called her son. She texted. Still no answer. When she checked her own PortSys account, she realized that Jeffrey had unfriended her that morning, leaving her unable to see his port history. By the time Monday morning arrived, she had turned frantic, porting to Jeffrey's chosen pin on the beach and wading through hordes of unimaginative tourists to look for her son, a human needle in the haystack. When she called PortSys to try to verify his current location, they refused to disclose it.

"Sometimes," Melanie says, "You trust your children too much, you know? Jeffrey was such a good kid, I'd have trusted him with any decision he made. But then I would forget he's still just a kid."

What Melanie didn't know was that Jeffrey's trip to Santa Monica was actually a premeditated ruse. He and Gallagher weren't going to California at all. Rather, they had spent the better part of a month sketching out a plan to port to the summit of Mount Everest. They studied storm patterns. They borrowed mountaineering gear from a friend (lightweight, to adhere to PortSys' YOU PLUS TWO guidelines, which allow for teleporting an extra two kilograms on your person in addition to the mass of your naked body) plus bottles of supplemental from a more experienced summiter. They went on long runs in high altitude cities: cities that Jeffrey had truthfully told his mother he was going to visit, while keeping hidden his ulterior motive for the jaunts.

The plan was port to increasingly high altitudes, get acclimated, and then hit the summit. Once on the roof of the world, Jeffrey and Paul would take in the view of the surrounding hemisphere, get a selfie, and then leave in an instant.

It is, of course, not legal to port to the summit of Everest. Since the advent of porting, only the South Slope of the mountain is open to climbing, with the North Slope formally closed by a Chinese government that outlawed porting from the start and has no plans to reverse that policy. Thus, oversight of Everest's unlicensed port tourism has fallen mostly to overwhelmed Nepalese officials.

The path to the summit was awash in litter and human excrement long before the advent of PortPhones, and porting has only exacerbated the problems at the top of the mountain. As with other national landmarks all over the world, port tourists have overwhelmed and desecrated what were once carefully preserved lands. In a bit of morbid irony, the deadly environs of Everest have help protect it from being completely overrun. Other parks and attractions lack such natural deterrents.

And standard tourist attractions are even more vulnerable, particularly spots highlighted by popular WorldGram travel accounts like @GoHere, which can create nightmare crowding situations the instant it recommends a porting destination. The Eiffel Tower in Paris is patrolled by armed forces at all times because port tourists stampede in at all hours, but the Tower is fortunate enough to be able to afford that security. Prominent amusement parks like Cedar Point in Ohio now must charge by the ride instead of charging gate admission because they can't build a portwall large enough to secure the grounds. Pebble Beach golf course in California now has PINE agents on carts patrolling the holes 24/7. Other hotspots, such as Monte Alban in Oaxaca and parts north of the aurora oval in Alaska, lack the funding to afford a portwall or beefed-up security, and have thus suffered environmental and ecological decay due to massive increases in foot traffic.

The summit of Everest, despite its hostile climate, has also suffered likewise. Perhaps it hasn't suffered the same amount of damage as Uluru in Australia, but any damage done to the roof of the world is substantial and permanent. New mountaineering laws have not helped. Anyone caught porting to the summit of Everest is subject to arrest and fines in excess of $500,000. But catching violators and enforcing fines is nearly impossible. While Nepalese officials were glad that porting eased some of traffic to the summit, they have had little control over the inevitable overcrowding that now routinely happens on it, especially when weather conditions prove favorable. How can you control the top of a mountain when anyone can get there by pushing a button and stepping into a wormhole? You can't keep a police force 33,000 feet up in the sky. You can't patrol it from the air. Proposals to create a portwall around the summit have proved unworkable.

To prevent being identified at the summit, Jeffrey Greenberg and Paul Gallagher left their passport lanyards behind in a still-unknown location. Jeffrey's callowness meant that he had vastly overestimated his ability to execute the Everest plan. As they ported from one acclimation point to the next, Jeffrey complained to Gallagher that he felt nauseous and dizzy: unmistakable signs of altitude sickness. An encroaching storm system—not exactly a surprise development around Everest—forced Jeffrey and Gallagher to accelerate their plans and shorten their acclimation intervals so that they could port to the summit and get out before the squall bore down.

That would prove to be a fatal error, because Jeffrey's lungs were already starved for oxygen. At the peak of Everest, the air only has roughly a third of the oxygen contained in the air at sea level. That thin air, combined with the drop in air pressure, can tax the lungs of even a seasoned climber. And Jeffrey was far from that.

The instant the two boys ported to the South Summit, with an altitude of 28,704 feet, Jeffrey collapsed and began to convulse, the result of a cerebral edema. Gallagher, now terrified, tried to program Jeffrey's PortPhone to port his friend back to safer ground, but couldn't get his bandmate's finger to hold steady on the phone's scanner prompt. Even if Gallagher had succeeded in this, Jeffrey never would have been able to take the crucial step to complete the porting. He was stuck seizing at the summit, his body desperate to hyperventilate but too weak to do so. His diaphragm cramped into a hard knot. The oxygen supply to his brain got cut off entirely. When Gallagher called American medical startup 1RSPND and begged them to have first responders port to the summit, the company told him that they were over their monthly porting data limit, and that PortSys had throttled their service. Mountaineers that had secured official permits to summit the mountain began to openly grouse at the two boys clogging up the summit, which has a surface area roughly the size of an apartment closet. No one was going to help Jeffrey Greenberg.

It was all over in less than a minute. A nearby team of experienced climbers, who had made the summit the old-fashioned way, rushed to administer CPR to Jeffrey, but by then he had no pulse. With the storm closing in quickly, Paul Gallagher, who would only agree to speak on background for this story, had little choice but to abandon his friend right there, 100 meters below the highest point on Earth.

Jeffrey Greenberg's body remains on Everest to this day, scattered among the hundreds of other corpses resting on the mountain that cannot be removed, neither by porting nor by law. He is far from alone in being the only young person to meet a gruesome fate by porting somewhere he didn't belong. There was the case of Taylor Garrison, a college student who accidentally ported into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and drowned. There was the case of Megan Abay, who got stuck in a faulty wormhole that teleported her back and forth from her apartment in Chicago to her parents' home in Addis Ababa every microsecond, splitting her into two places simultaneously and destroying her mind. There was Leann Egan, who was ported 200 feet above her intended pin in Maui thanks to what PortSys described as a "glitch" in its famously guarded algorithm. She fell to her death.

And then there was the strange case of Anthony Drazic, a seven-year-old who, through yet another system "bug," ported directly into the body of a full-grown man named Joshua Klim, killing both instantly. Drazic's body had to be surgically removed from Klim's abdomen in a gruesome Caesarian section that would take a Serbian coroner thirteen hours to complete. To this day, it remains the only violation of PortSys's supposedly ironclad law that solid matter cannot port into other solid matter. And then there are, of course, the tens of thousands of runaways and refugees shot and killed by interior patrols lurking in the United States, the United Kingdom, Spain, Russia, and every other country looking to crack down on port migration.

These deaths, be they the result of direct failures in PortSys's algorithm, or the result of PortSys failing to curtail its users' more reckless impulses, have invariably resulted in solemn statements issued by the company, along with any number of discreetly agreed-upon cash settlements. Melanie Greenberg was offered $28,000 to settle her case against PortSys. When she refused and filed a formal lawsuit, the case was thrown out in Federal court after Congress passed a law that made it illegal to sue "any porting carrier" (curious wording, given that PortSys is the only porting carrier in existence) for accidents resulting from the use of their products.

Calls for PortSys to restrict how users port—into private homes, into war zones, and to dangerous terrain—have been rebuffed by the company in the name of port neutrality. The closest PortSys has come to fixing the problem is establishing two-factor confirmation for any user wishing to port into "conflict zones," areas marked as dangerous by the company (of course, those designations have often been met with vehement protest by residents of said zones). They promise that the bugs that killed Josh Klim and Leann Egan have been fixed in later software updates. The company's parental controls, ostensibly introduced to help parents monitor where kids port, remain cumbersome and lightly used.

When Jason Kirsch was confronted with these facts in an email exchange with me, he remained defiant.

"Our terms of service are clear," he told me. "Our port moderators do not advise people porting to certain areas they have declared as unsafe, but we are not going to close off those areas and restrict the God-given freedoms of those who are experienced and hardy enough to tackle that kind of terrain. I myself have ported to such locations. Have you been to the top of Devil's Tower? I have. It's breathtaking. It is incumbent upon users to follow both their better instincts and the laws of anywhere they choose to port."

"So you're absolved of all responsibility in these deaths?" I asked him.

"Let me make it clear, Katy: This company saved the world. You know that. I know I speak for my mother when I say it's a terrible thing any time someone experiences a porting malfunction."

You mean a porting death.

"No, these are unfortunate malfunctions. In the event of someone harming himself during the porting process, we mourn just as his family mourns."

I don't believe that.

"Believe what you want to believe," Jason Kirsch wrote back. "I have the facts on my side, and what the facts say is that porting solved this planet's energy crisis, along with its housing crisis and its traffic crisis. People can now evacuate from natural disasters in a snap, and rescue workers can port into those same areas with equal speed. Once we get China on board with porting, we'll have improved modern civilization by orders of magnitude. To me, it's insane that some people don't appreciate this. WE INVENTED TELEPORTATION. How can you not be astounded by that? I'm astounded by it every day! Do you understand how many lives this company has saved? 40,000 automobile related deaths in the United States alone. Every year. All saved. Why is that not the focus of your story?"

(Jason Kirsch is not entirely correct here: While passenger automobile deaths are now nearly extinct, trucking fatalities have increased over 500% since the advent of porting, thanks to decaying highway infrastructure plus huge increases in demand for construction and shipped goods in formerly remote areas.)

Melanie Greenberg has never seen her son's body. To visit Jeffrey, she would either have to pay an outrageous amount to have it removed from Everest, or she herself would have to port to the summit, something she is terrified to do both from a physical and legal standpoint. For now, Jeffrey's body remains on display in a permanent, open wake she'll never be able to attend. She long ago forgave Paul Gallagher for his role in Jeffrey's death. Instead, she saves the bulk of her ire for PortSys and the Kirsch family. Sometimes, when she wakes up in the morning, she discovers that she's written hundreds of words in frantic night scribbling. She shows me the notes, which take up an entire filing box.

Are all those notes for the Kirsches?

"Not all of them. I spare more than a few for myself."

I don't think you're alone in having a hard time reckoning with how much freedom to give your children.

"Yeah but my son is dead, so I have hard proof I did a lousy job, don't I? I caved when I should've been stronger. And I let him have this power, because I wanted to have it too."

This is when I notice a rectangular bulge in Melanie's pocket. She takes out her old PortPhone6, the screen slightly cracked and the chrome edges nicked and scarred. She knows what I'm about to ask, so she goes ahead and answers in advance.

"It's for the Kirsches. It's my only way to get to Emilia and Jason. When they do one of their bullshit listening tours, or when Jason stages one of his insufferable new product launches, that's when I'm gonna port in and tell them about my son."

And then?

"And then, I swear to you, I will throw this thing in the fucking ocean."

The Boy on the Mountaintop syndicated from https://triviaqaweb.wordpress.com/feed/

[ecotone99]

[HR] [SF] Spence - Chapter 2

‘Fore we got rid of Dr. McFuckknuckle and The Three Stooges, went through all their things and vehicles. No identification at all.

That tablet thing ‘Curly’ had was, along with bein’ a tracker for Spence, a maintenance console kinda thing. Get back to that here in a minute.

The doc’s car had some real interestin’ toys inside. Was a laptop, set up on a stand like in a police vehicle. Opened it up, and it lit up fine, but wanted a password, or a fingerprint. Lucky for me, once I pried open ol’ doc’s torn off hand and cleaned it up a mite, the thumbprint from that did the trick. Couple minutes of tinkerin’ got me my thumbprint authorized jest fine. Tossed that hand back over by its former owner. Spence followed the toss with his head, and chuffed. ‘Good riddance to bad rubbish, right?’ He cocked his head at me, like he was thinkin’ that over.

Was a leather folder which had some papers, a small black nylon toolbag, and a power cord/adapter for keeping the laptop charged.

Plugged the laptop up in the shack, ‘fore we headed out to get rid of the trash.

Loaded the dead weight into the back of that SUV, jerry-rigged a tow for the doc’s car, got ready to haul out into the back-country. Plenty of room for Spence in the back seat. Opened the door and said ‘C’mon bud. It’s garbage day.’ Spence kinda ‘chuffed’, would not get in.

‘You gonna stay here, slick?’

<chuff>

Goddamn, he was sayin’ no.

‘Fair enough, you plenty fast, bud. Follow me.’

Headed out, and Spence was a joy to see in motion. He’d rocket out ahead, swoop around and jet right back. He was playin’ with his lil ol’ slow human. Such a cat, that guy. Wiseass.

Got to where we was gonna dump this sack o’ assholes, and made sure to kick Dr. MFK in the ribs until my leg was tired. Not that it bothered him much, made me feel better.

Not gonna get too detailed on where/how all that was dealt with. Some things are best left unsaid ... but no one is ever gonna find them, or their vehicles ... and there are a couple-three less incendiary grenades left.

Was a long walk back, but Spence had a time. He’d spot a jack-rabbit, start up that chittery thing he does, and off he’d go. Chase the poor lil bugger for a while, and then he’d stop, let that jack run off, look back at me, and speed on back. Keepin’ an eye on his human. Saw a buzzard off on high, ridin’ the thermals. Guess we wasn’t the only ones takin’ care of dead meat today.

Just managed to beat the rain, and nightfall when we got back home.

Was time to get back to those ‘stay tuned’ things, so made up some coffee, and started snoopin’.

That laptop and those papers had some info, but the rest here is some wild-ass-guessin’:

Spence is a ‘prototype weapons system.’ Was the only one that ‘was successful’. Seems ‘they’ (not clear on who ‘they’ really is, but ‘they’ had some deep pockets, as Dr. MFK didn’t seem to have much problem keepin’ the lights on) had built some kinda ’AI’. Too bad for ‘they’, this AI? That dog won’t hunt. Couldn’t manage to ‘code a hunting instinct.’ Some bright-boy lab rat fella decided to ‘look into the feline mind’ to get that ‘hunter/killer’ code.

Dr. MFK was that lab rat. Pretty sure the process died with him. Small favors.

Seems the idea that he come up with was what he called a ‘matrix’ that this AI thing could run in, and the cat ‘code’ part could be copied in there, to give them that missin’ piece. There warn’t no ‘organic’ Spence left in that shiny body, from what I could figger. Just that matrix thing, swaddled up in Spence’s metal and silicon innards, with Spence and that AI all mixed up together.

He also figgered out that ferals and cats not raised ... whaddyacallit ... underfoot? Well, not bonded to humans, they wasn’t gonna work either.

Bastard slaughtered a lot of cats. ‘Spence, Ima thinkin’ the Doc here got off light.’ Spence chuffed again. Ima guessin’ this time he was agreein’ with me.

Spence was a smart fella before, but now he’s scary smarter. Still good company. Conversation is nice, just too damn big for lap-sittin’.

—-

[SIGNAL SCAN IN PROGRESS]

[SIGNAL DETECTED]

[SIGNAL TRIANGULATION ENGAGED]

—-

Also figgered out that the tools in that bag were for openin’ up maintenance ports and the like on Spence’s chrome carcass. One of them had a port for connectin’ that little maintenance console up. Told ya I’d get back to that. Was able to find the tracker tag they had plugged into Spence. Pulled that sumbitch out and unhooked its battery. Put that all away in the toolbag. Oh yeah, Spence is stealth. I can’t claim to understand how it works, but I read that, and tried to take a picture with my old digital camera, and all I could see was a kinda washed out blur, like the lens was smudged. Does the same kinda thing to radar signals and the like, but I ain’t got no way to test that. The black magic don’t extend to regular optical cameras, but that’s ok. Hell, I wanna be able to see him.

—-

[TRIANGULATION INCOMPLETE]

[SIGNAL LOST]

—-

Feelin’ kinda proud of myself at this point, so I closed Spence back up, grabbed a beer, and hit my chair. Spence sat on my left, and leaned his head on my leg. Put my hand on his ear, and he buzzed that purr of his, and lightly thumped his tail. We listened to the rain, until it faded out.

That was pretty close to the last time we felt peaceful.

Thinkin’ that ‘they’ might want to collect on their spendin’, and scoop up Spence. Yeah, well, fellas. Gonna have to go thru me first. Ima thinkin’ we two gonna hit the road. Dunno where to yet, but ‘they’ probably got the shack already nailed down. Also thinkin’ about that buzzard.

Next day, shit to do. Told Spence to guard the shack, and I’d be back. He chuffed and ima sure that was his version of an eye-roll. Walked down to the highway. Waved down the bus. Took that to the city (the other direction from town), and bought a new-to-me truck, with a camper shell on the back. Figgered that would give Spence some cover from all the lookie-loos.

Once I was back home, towed the trusty old truck out to the back-country, for a hero’s funeral. Couple less incendiaries. At least this time, didn’t need to walk back. Yep, could still see that circlin’ bird. Like that paintin’ ... this is not a pipe, and that ain’t no buzzard. Spence was chasin’ jack-rabbits again. I stopped the truck.

‘Spence!’ He spun around and come runnin’ back. ‘Hey bud. Ima thinkin’ you understand me a lot more than you used to. See that?’ I kinda pointed up the bird’s way. Spence’s head tracked the lazy circles for a bit, and then he looked back at me, head cocked. ‘Yep. Ima thinkin’ we on borrowed time. Those ‘they’ fellas are watchin’.’ He thought on that, and gave me a chuff. ‘Time to go, old fella’.’ He didn’t make a sound this time. Just cocked his head, like he does... and then walking over and givin’ me a head bump on my leg. Understood that perfect. I opened up the door, and he jumped in the back of the double-cab.

Got back home, and started packin’ up.

Got my back-country hikin’ gear. Packed some boxes with non-perishables. Loaded up the jugs of water I already had. Wrapped up our little armory in some tarps. Stowed that laptop and the other gear in my pack. Made sure my scatter-gun was loaded and handy. Was just finishing securing ever’thin’ down, when Spence made his chitter sound, looking back towards the road to the highway.

‘Goddammit, guess we outta time, bud. You stay here, in the truck. Let’s see what these assholes are up to.’

<chuff>

It looked to be one of the staties’ prowlers. I got no problem with the real authorities, but I made sure my sawed-off was in easy, hidden reach.

Prowler pulled to a stop. Could see two folks inside. In my experience with the staties, there’s usually only one per car. Somethin’ is not right here.

They both got out. ‘Good afternoon, sir.’

‘Afternoon officers, can I help you fellas?’

‘Yessir. We are out here, working with the rangers, letting people know that there is a very dangerous wild animal in the area. Have you noticed any signs? Any lost livestock? Pets? Anything like that?’

The one talkin’ was bein’ real calm and reassurin’ and walkin’ over easy like, with a nice, friendly grin. The other one was kinda off to the side, movin’ slow and steady, kinda like he was tryin’ to flank me... lookin’ everywhere but at me. Noticed that their sidearms were not the standard statie issue, but more like smaller versions of the Stooges’ weapons, with extended magazines. This is not a pipe, and these ain’t staties.

From where they was at, they couldn’t get a clear view of Spence, but he saw them. I could see him trackin’ their progress from the corner of my eye.

‘Well sir, don’t have any livestock to speak of. Was out hikin’ some today. Didn’t see no varmints bigger than a jack-rabbit.’ Was edgin’ my hand over to the sawed-off.

The chatty one smiled bigger, and started to reply, when the sneaky one finally got to where he saw Spence. He grabbed at his shoulder mike, and they both reached down for their weapons, but they never had a chance. I was spinning behind the truck, grabbin’ my scatter-gun, but I never even got it pulled.

I knew Spence was fast, but the last time he did this, I didn’t see the details. My buddy Spence is a beautiful goddamn chrome murder machine.

Spence went right through the side window of the camper shell. He tore into Sneaky, snipped both hands off clean, and slashed his throat deep, all in one move. Sneaky dropped, no sound but wet chokin’. Never even keyed the mike. Spence was over on Smiley in less than a heartbeat, before he could even get turned. Spence took that gunhand clean, and dropped ol’ Smiley on his back, and held him there, front paws on his shoulders, with the claws slid in for purchase, pressin’ down. Spence smiled, if you can call a mouthful of steely razors smilin’.

It was quiet, ‘cept for Spence’s metallic chirr, and Smiley’s sobs, as he clutched the stub with his remaining hand, ghost white face locked on Spence.

I walked over with my scatter-gun on my shoulder. Put a hand on Spence’s head and rubbed that ear. He thumped my leg once with his tail, not moving anything else.

Knelt down a little off to the side, up by Smiley’s head.

‘Son, meet Spence. Now, you and me? We gonna have us a little come-to-Jesus meetin’.’

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