regarding the kindness of strangers.

Over the last few days, I’ve encountered a lot of people who have been kind to me. I’ve seen people in random places, like the grocery store and the pet store, who have told me that they read my stuff online, and they appreciate me. I ran into a bunch of people at my friend’s show last night, who told me how much they value — not just like, but value — Tabletop, and more than a few people there told me that they thought I was a good person who does good things.

If you’re one of these people, I know I said “thank you” in person, but I want to say it again, in public, in a way that my anxiety doesn’t allow when we’re face to face.

Thank you! I needed that, so much.

You see, I *really* needed to be reminded that the stuff I do matters to people, and is worth my time and effort. I’m dealing with a few really terrible things in my real life that I’m not talking about in public, and won’t talk about in public, and at the same time, I’ve been struggling with anxiety. I can feel a capital-D Depressive episode lurking around pretty much every corner, and I’m doing my best to practice my CBT and take my meds and talk to the people who are close to me, who care about me and help me when my brain decides to turn on me. For far too long, my brain has been going out of its way to remind me that I suck at everything, the book I’ve worked so hard on for so long is going to fail (it won’t; I’m super proud of it and believe in it), and nobody cares about me or what I do. The world has moved on, I’m drifting into “trivia answer” territory, and if I just disappeared from public life tomorrow, nobody would care or notice.

I know that none of that is real, but … well, I’ve written about Depression before and how it is such a giant dick about stuff like this. It’s challenging to tune out that insistent voice of doubt and despair, even when I know that it’s just a bunch of noise.

I shouldn’t give trolls and harassers any space in my head, too, but I gotta be honest: that last week on Twitter was horrible. Every day was a flood of people putting in considerable time and effort to make me miserable, and even though I was able to ignore most of it, some of it still got through. I mean, I’m just human and I have a wonky brain, so…

Maybe I’m just more *aware* of the kindness of people in the last few days, or maybe there really has been some kind of uptick in kindness for some reason that normal people can probably see, but remains hidden to me. But the end result is: I’m doing everything I can to practice gratitude, kindness, empathy, and patience. I’m not always successful, but the affirmation I’ve gotten from people who don’t know me and have no reason to reach out with kindness and appreciation has made a HUGE difference.

I’m so grateful for the love and support and patience that my wife and children give me every day, but I’ve been dealing with so much negativity and cruelty, I haven’t been able to see and feel it. The people who have been kind and gentle to me recently sort of helped push back the weasels of despair that have been threatening to overwhelm me, which has created the space in my life that I couldn’t make myself to accept and embrace the love of my wife and kids.

So thank you, people who don’t know me and have nothing to gain by being kind to me, for your kindness, whether you are offline or online.

And please consider this: you have choices all day long about how you treat people. Every interaction can be kind, or it can be cruel, and the choice you make will have an effect on people you’ll never meet. Make a choice that you’ll feel good about.

Thanks for listening.

the summer of mild inconveniences

About three months ago, we discovered toxic black mold underneath our kitchen sink. Two weeks after that, Anne and I packed up some bags and moved ourselves and our dogs out of our house, while a team of hazardous materials removal dudes tore apart our kitchen and made our house look like Breaking Bad.

A month after we moved out, we were able to come back into our house, because the mold (which originally appeared to be a few square feet, and ended up being much, much worse) had been successfully removed. The only problem with getting back into our house was our kitchen remained (and remains) torn up. Our refrigerator is in the middle of our living room. Our dishwasher is on our patio. We have no sink, so there’s no running water, so we can’t cook.

It’s all a real pain in the ass, and it’s made this entire summer feel like something we are enduring, rather than living.

But.

It’s important to me that I keep and maintain perspective. Starting at the very beginning of this, with the toxic black mold: nobody got sick, and we discovered it just before it spread into the walls in a way that would force us to literally tear our house down.

Insurance denied our claim for reasons that I think are bullshit. We tried and failed to fight their denial, and while it’s infuriating that they got away with it, we’re very grateful and very lucky that the whole thing didn’t cost as much as we feared, and we’re grateful and lucky that we can afford to pay for it out of pocket.

We had to be out of our house for over a month, but our friends let us stay in their home (they were out of the country), so we didn’t have to endure the cost and weirdness of living in a hotel for thirty days. We got to take our dogs with us, and we were in such a quiet and unfamiliar location, it gave me the solitude I needed to focus and finish the manuscript of the novel I was writing.

Did I bury the lede on that? My novel is currently with my editor, and even though I still need to do some work on it, it’s that much closer to being finished and published. That’s kind of a big deal for me.

Our same friends offered us their house in Hana if we wanted to get out of town for a little bit, and Anne used points and miles to get us an unexpected vacation in Hawaii for less than the cost of a single plane ticket. I’m grateful for that.

After we got back from Hana, we were able to move back into our house, even though the kitchen was (and is) all torn apart. We’ve had to eat out for every meal, which has not been awesome, but I’m grateful that we can afford that, and that we live in a place that has lots of healthy and affordable options to feed ourselves. I’ve been joking that we’re sort of like college students who eat out of take away containers, but with a fancy budget.

When we got back into our house about a month ago, we expected to live in the chaos for about five days, before everything was finished and restored to the way it was before … but everything takes longer than expected, and as of this morning, my refrigerator is still in the middle of my living room.

But.

I’m grateful that this summer has been, in perspective, a series of mild inconveniences that haven’t wrecked our lives. I’m grateful that Anne found someone who could replace our hardwood floor with an exact match, even though the boards in our house haven’t been made since the 1940s. I’m grateful that they matched the floors perfectly. I’m grateful that they were able to rebuild our cabinets and save our countertops so perfectly, you can’t even tell that they’re new. I’m grateful that the people who have done all this work on our home have been kind, honest, hard workers (who my dogs love, which is important. If your dogs don’t like someone, respect that, because dogs seem to have good instincts about people for some reason.) I’m grateful that, when this is all finished, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell that anything ever happened, because everything is matching close to perfectly.

I haven’t spent this summer making things, like I wanted to. I haven’t started writing anything new. I haven’t spent any time on my blog since June, and though it feels weird, I haven’t really missed it. I feel like I am in this part of my creative cycle where I absorb and consume and get inspired by other people’s creations, so I am nourished and ready for the output part of my creative cycle, whenever it decides to arrive.

I’ve spent this summer reading lots of books, and watching almost one movie a day. I know that sounds like goofing off and fucking around, but for me, it’s a fundamental part of my creative life and my creative self. I get inspired by good things and bad things, and I’ve consumed a lot of both this summer. I have found the same kind of comfort and familiarity in a book that I had when I was a kid: no matter where I am or what’s going on, I can open a book and lose myself in it. I’ve found so much happiness and comfort in the books I’ve read this summer, it’s inspired me to dedicate myself to finishing my novel asap, so I can maybe give people who read it the same escape and happiness I’m getting.

For my novel, I needed to find a slasher movie from pre-83 that wasn’t Friday the 13th or Halloween. It needed to be something that the kids in my story would have rented at the video store, and even though I could have gotten away with using one of those popular and well-known films, I wanted to find something different for reasons I’ll get into when I start writing my “here’s how I did it” posts about the novel, in the run up to its release. The upshot of this is that I’ve watched a TON of early 80s slasher movies this year, and holy shit am I primed to write and make one of my own, because I understand them at a granular level I didn’t think was possible, and I want to see what happens when I make my version of that kind of thing, even if it’s just a short script.

I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to do that level of research (some of them have been fun to watch, others are just terrible, but it’s always been worth it), and I wouldn’t have made the time if my house hadn’t been torn apart. Maybe I’ll even work an unfinished kitchen into the story, as an homage to this whole shitshow.

So. It’s been a summer of mild inconveniences, and I’m grateful and lucky that it isn’t so much worse. I’m grateful for the life I have, and for the people I get to share it with, especially my best friend and wife, Anne. I hope that, wherever you are and whatever your personal circumstances are, you get to share your life with someone who is as special to you as Anne is to me. I hope that you have the privilege (like I do) of looking at bummer things that happen, and finding some perspective that makes them feel less frustrating and annoying than they could be.

This is the first post I’ve written since I deactivated my Twitter. I wonder if anyone will see it? I wonder if I’m wrong about Twitter not making any difference in blog traffic or book sales. I’m going to feel really silly if I am. Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer, and I hope that any inconveniences you have encountered have been mild.

Thanks for listening.

intrusion is my illusion

A little over fifteen years ago, I started writing a blog. I loved lifting the curtain on my personal life and sharing what was going on as I learned how to be a father, handled a vindictive ex-husband who exhausted my family while he tried to hurt my wife (not caring that he was doing a lot of collateral damage to my then step-kids at the same time), and about my almost-daily struggles to figure out why I had a once-promising acting career that had stalled out and wasn’t going anywhere.

I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words since then, not just in my blog, but in books and for places I was honored and privileged to contribute to, like Suicide Girls and the AV Club. Over the last year or so, I’ve put about 71000 words into the manuscript of my first novel, and I’ve wasted far, far, far too much time on Twitter.

I really hate Twitter. It was once promising, and I feel like it still does some good, but on balance, it enables harassment and evil and cruelty at least as much if not more than it helps things change for the better. I feel like it has broken our society, and wrecked our social contract. I feel like the board at Twitter, and its CEO, Jack Dorsey, know this, but they’re too busy profiting from their inaction to care. May history judge them all the way they deserve.

I’ve been thinking about how bad Twitter has become, and how I can’t imagine asking people to follow me there like I did when it started so long ago. I’ve been thinking about how angry and sickened I am by the Fascist who is currently occupying the presidency, and the people he has surrounded himself with who enable and encourage him and his hateful conduct that goes against everything America has always represented to the world (except for the shameful and indefensible parts of our history, like slavery, Jim Crow, and Internment).

I’ve been thinking about how I want to tell silly and even hearfelt stories in my blog. I’ve been thinking about how I want to share how wonderful my kids were on Father’s Day, (which they know I don’t care about) when they took me out to lunch and ice cream anyway, because it was an excuse to be together. I want to write about how much I love my daughter in law, and how happy she makes my son. I’ve been thinking about how I want to write about how grateful I am that, even though my kids are 28 and 26, and not children at all anymore, they still want to spend time with me. I want to write about how great it feels to know that all the suffering we all went through when they were young didn’t affect our family in the way it was designed to. I want to celebrate that the worst person in the world, who made our lives a living hell, is relegated to a rarely-remembered footnote in our family’s history, who is living the life he deserves. I don’t write about these things, now, because they are deeply personal, and I don’t feel like it’s aways necessary or even smart to pull the curtain back on my life, or the lives of my family.

And yet … I will write about something personal, real quick, because it’s a story I’ve wanted to tell for almost ten years:

Continue reading… →

regarding blocklists, trolls, twitter’s systemic inaction against abuse, and the responsibility of wielding great power

Jesus what a day.

Apparently, a couple of exceptionally popular YouTube creators were talking on Twitter about being blocked by me. Their fans grabbed their jump to conclusions mats, torches and pitchforks in hand, and went on a rampage through my mentions.

So I guess it’s time for the obligatory blog post that I don’t want to write but need to write, about how I use social media.

First off: I think I know what happened in this case. A couple months (or maybe it was weeks; in 2018, hours can feel like days) ago, a toxic YouTube personality with a large and unsurprisingly toxic following just went after me one day, without provocation. Over the years, people have tried to create the illusion of a feud with me, in an effort to get my attention and grab some free publicity to drive up views and subscriptions. I always ignore these things, because they are childish at best, and they invite a kind of negativity and vitriol that I would prefer not to have in my life. (As a side note, if someone claiming to be a social media expert pitches the fake feud idea to you, fire them and burn their contact information to the ground. That person is an idiot.)

Anyway. This person already had a following that eclipsed mine by several a factor of at least ten, so they weren’t going to gain anything if I gave them the attention they were looking for. It honestly felt like a young person who was feeling powerful and wanted to use the power of their following to make my life miserable, to entertain the shitty people who follow them. In my efforts to be empathetic to this person, I will freely admit that, when I was in my teens or early twenties, I probably would have thought that what they were doing was harmless, and that the person who was being attacked and dogpiled probably deserved it for some reason, and that they shouldn’t take everything so seriously. Thankfully, I grew up and out of that mentality.

So awhile ago, when this person turned my Twitter mentions into a goddamn Nazi rally, I did a little work to track down patient zero. I found this person, blocked their account, and then blocked their followers, so they would lose one of their attack vectors. I freely accept that a lot of innocent people were caught up in this massive blocking, and many of them are YouTube personalities (because it appears that, at some point, an explicit or implicit agreement was made among YouTubers that a lot of them would follow each other on social media. I wonder why good and decent people would follow this toxic person, but that’s on them, not on me.) In the aftermath, a lot of these YouTube personalities have, at some point, made a bunch of noise about being blocked by me. “Oh why did this happen,” they wonder, “I’ve never interacted with this guy. Please tell me, dear followers who worship me, whatever did I do to deserve this great injustice.”

Real quick: In this example, I present the imagined locutor as acting in bad faith, but can sincerely relate to that feeling. From time to time, someone I know and like RTs someone, but I can’t see it because I’ve been blocked by that person. I usually a have a little bit of a sad, because most of the time that person who has blocked me is someone I would like to see on Twitter, but I don’t pitch a fit about it, because I am a goddamn adult, and they don’t owe me anything.

I have said this on Twitter in a thread before, but I don’t think I’ve said it here: if you think you were wrongly or inadvertently blocked by me on Twitter, I’m painfully easy to get in touch with so you can ask about it and get it removed. Like, you certainly don’t have to, but you can if you want to. If you throw a fit about it and send your followers after me, you’ve made me feel like I don’t regret blocking you by accident. If you do this thing that people do where they are just asking about it and don’t really mean anything wink wink (sealioning), I don’t regret blocking you by accident. I want everyone to understand that Twitter is a mess, because Jack is a terrible CEO and doesn’t act like he cares at all about limiting Nazis, trolls, Russian bots, and other bad people. I believe that he doesn’t care because every single time someone or some group of people work hard to solve his problem (which is all of our problem) for him, he treats it like a public relations problem, not a systemic problem on the platform he runs, that is making the world a worse place due to his inaction. Because Twitter does not make it easy to manage and reduce attacks and other bad acts, we have to rely on imperfect tools like shared blocklists, extensions that help us identify and block trolls and bots, and tools that do mass blockings of an account’s followers. I’ve said many times, it’s a blunt and messy and imperfect instrument. It’s a nuclear bomb where what’s really needed is a rapier, but we go to war with the tools we have. Thanks for nothing, Jack. I hope you believe that the money you are earning is worth the damage you are inflicting on the world, and I hope you sleep really well at night.

Back to this morning. My mentions turn into this morass of anime avatars, poor grammar and racist, bigoted attacks. So, as I said above, I felt like I didn’t particularly care that I blocked these people, if this is the way the people they attract behave. If you attract a lot of bigots and trolls, you may just be a bigot and a troll, goes the math.

But that’s where I think, hey, maybe things are a little more complex than that. Because when multiple millions of people follow a person, that person can’t be reasonably held to account for everything every one of those followers does. Sure, there’s the glaring and profound exception of people who encourage and condone terrible behavior because they engage in it themselves, but most of us who have large audiences are going to end up with a few bad folks in that audience, because of math and human psychology. A few people who follow and/or know these guys reached out and said, essentially, “hey, these guys are good people and knowing what I know about you, I think you’d probably get along in regular circumstances. Please don’t let a small representation of their audience affect the way you feel about them.” I will admit and own that I can intellectually agree with that statement entirely, while emotionally struggling to be as graceful as I’d like to be in my idealized self.

Part of me really wants to unblock these people, because they seem like genuinely good people who exercised poor judgment. Another part of me doesn’t want to reward bad behavior. The biggest part of me believes that in about 18 hours nobody will care about this and they’ll go back to rolling in towers of YouTube cash, forgetting that I ever existed.

So I don’t know what I’m going to do in this instance, but since I’m spending the time writing about it, I want to make the following points very clear, so I have something to point to the next time this happens:

I actually use Twitter and other social platforms the way people use them. I’m not a hashtag brand who doesn’t care. I’m a real person who really looks at mentions and stuff. I’ve said it before: if you cut me, I will bleed.
Nobody is entitled to my time and attention. Yes, I block thousands of people on Twitter, because it’s that bad for me on Twitter. Yes, I block lots of people who I’ve never talked to and never will talk to. Usually, that’s because they’ve announced to the world that they’re garbage by following a garbage account that trolls and bullies and attacks people. Occasionally, it’s a mistake, and when that mistake is brought to my attention in a mature and respectful way, I do my best to correct it.
Chris Hardwick gave me great advice that I’m going to paraphrase here. He said that when you’re interacting with a person, and your first reaction is GO FUCK YOURSELF, think about all the times you’ve wanted to unleash Hell on someone, but three or four or seven messages later, you can talk like people and move on with your lives. Hardwick says that he does his best to start out at that seventh message, so he doesn’t blow up at someone in a way he’ll regret. I do my best to follow this advice, but I admit and own that when something like tearing children away from their parents is the issue at hand, I don’t have any patience or understanding or acceptance of someone who is anything other than sickened and outraged and horrified by it. There’s never gonna be a seventh message with that person, because that person holds beliefs that are reprehensible to me. But when someone is pissed about a joke they didn’t like on Big Bang Theory or thinks I ruined tabletop gaming by making it more accessible, or has taken a friendly sports rivalry too far, it’s a lot easier to get to that seventh message.
When Twitter treats abuse as a serious, systemic, societal issue with real consequences, and not as a public relations challenge, all of this will change. Until then, I will continue to use clumsy and blunt instruments to make my experience on the platform as nontoxic as possible. In other words, I’d love to use a lightsaber, but right now, I only have a blaster at my side.
Remember that there’s a real person on the other side of your social media interactions. This is especially important for young people, because there is not a person alive who can hurt and be hurt like a teenager. I promise you that you’re going to get older, and you’re going to be mortified by the terrible things you did when you know that you should have known better. If I blocked SuperYouTube6969 and you think they’re the greatest thing since memes, don’t take it personally. I can assure you that it has nothing to do with you.
Let’s all do our best to start out at the seventh message.
If you’re a creator with a large audience, whether you like it or not you have a tremendous responsibility, and you have an incredible opportunity to decide if you’re going to use that audience to enrich yourself, or if you’re going to use the privilege you have to make the world a better place. How do you want to be remembered?
As always, don’t be a dick.

I know there’s more I want to say, but I have a raging headache right now and what I really want to be doing is working on my novel, so that’s where I’m going. Feel free to discuss this in a non-shitty way in comments here. And if you’re one of those people who was inadvertently blocked by me, let me know so I can take a look.

Thanks for listening.

this is brilliant

When we worked on Next Generation, Brent Spiner and I would sit at our consoles on the bridge, and make up lyrics to our show’s theme song. I vaguely recall coming up with some pretty funny and clever stuff, but nothing that held together as perfectly as this, from the weirdos over at meh.com: