Month: January 2020

“nothing so inartistic in mind”

Posted on by metaphlame

Wow, 1913 New York Times.

And the Sewanee Review:

As a staunch wooer, who resolutely lambasted the scant few fools who dared to try to make me the wooee, I say: fucccccck you, 1913 male reviewers. She doesn’t need a man with strength and initiative. She has the land, and herself, for that. What she needs is someone to talk to who gives a shit about her. Sorry that upends your chosen image of masculinity. He’s “worthy” because she says so, you dicks. It’s the investing in her of the power to make that determination that seems to flummox them?

Nothing so inartistic as female agency…

milk demons

Posted on by metaphlame

I never had those dreams you hear about pregnant people having, where the baby is a monster and rips their way out of you alien-style. No nightmares on that front. But I woke soaked in sweat this morning from a nightmare about milk demons. They disguised themselves in human clothing, with hoods or hats to obscure their telltale faces. But if you met their eyes there would be a spatter of white ink across a black background — like a video game jump scare encounter — and they’d know you were a breastfeeding mother producing milk, and they’d be on you to steal it.

In the dream, I was in a Lyft, waiting at a red light. I was twiddling on my phone. But then I glanced out the window, spacing out, and watched a group cross the street in the crosswalk, and noticed one person in a geeenish hoodie kind of hunching a lot, and I looked too long; they sensed me looking and turned…

And there was that frizzle of ink, complete with a jump scare sound effect, and suddenly I was screaming at the Lyft driver to please run the light, please, they were coming, and suddenly the milk demons, faces devoid of features except long tubes sort of like those muppets with the bike horn noses, were clawing at the windows, yanking at the door handles, trying to bash their way into the car. Their voices silent, their only sounds the scrabbling of their hands and the thump of their limbs on the metal.

I mention it because the whole setup sounds familiar. Is this from a game? A comic? I doubt a movie because I hate horror movies so how could I have seen something like this? But it was terrifying. They moved fast, not at all like shuffling zombies. Like vipers. I leapt two feet in the air when my blearily loyal dog padded silently into view behind me after I got up with shaking hands at 1AM.

The last time I was in serious airplane turbulence I was trying to distract myself by remembering, or trying to, the last time I had felt in mortal peril like I did then. Terror felt so familiar yet I led a soft life. Why did fear sweat seem so recognizable?

Dreams, man. Dreams. Fuck.

athletic pvp

Posted on by metaphlame

You’ll have heard of Peloton, and their admittedly disastrous ad campaign (as well as Ryan Reynolds’ gin campaign afterward, that plucked the unfortunate actress for an oblique reference to the Peloton fiasco while selling what is apparently very smooth gin).

Well I wanted a Peloton ever since leaving California and its much more health-encouraging climate and culture. I wanted one right up until an article just before the commercial debuted (given all the thinkpieces thrown around about that ad, I’m not even going to try to find the article that predated it) pointed out, in a comparison of home cycle options, that it did not bode well that Peloton as a start-up was still unable to turn a profit despite charging over two grand just for the hardware, not even counting the subscription fees to their studio classes.

The studio classes which were — again, if you’re at all familiar with the Peloton ad debacle, you’re probably aware of all this, so forgive me for glossing over it — the entire point of Peloton. The classes themselves had zero appeal to me: I don’t like exercising in groups; I hated group sports in high school; CrossFit and the idea of someone bellowing at me to try harder does not attract me. What did was the leaderboard. The live-time scroll of stats on the screen that told where you placed in relation to other people around the world also competing on that same ride.

peloton

I wanted that. Specifically, I wanted targets to chase down mercilessly. I make no bones about this being a healthy competitive mindset, either — that’s why I prefer exercising alone. Because since all of my group exercising has been so disastrous (spoilers: women are vicious to each other, especially when herded into gender-based competition where their bodies are the instruments by which they compete), when forced into competition I do it with a snarl on my face.

But I also, uh. Perform really well.

In my last job, for example, I noticed one day that an older, if admittedly absurdly fit, guy was in my college rival’s t-shirt. I made note of this. I didn’t have any of my college’s shirts on me — I ordered one — but then when it arrived I showed up and delibately trotted over to every machine he touched and did it harder, longer and faster. If he was on a machine there were multiple copies of — a treadmill, say — I made sure to outpace him there, too. I never said a word. I never met his eyes. This was not, I should hope would be obvious, some sort of flirting situation. I wanted him to know that despite his probably fad-dieted 40-something pack of abs, and his damn shirt from that damn school, my soft-bodied self could still outpace him.

A month or two later I mentioned my one-woman death slog to my friend as he passed across the way, and she choked. It turned out he was, uh. The vice president of the company.

Oh. Welp.

Anyway, Peloton quickly faded from my wantlist as Black Friday deals loomed, because the studio classes are all they offer. And as the weather turned to garbage it became clear that more than no-holds-barred competition, what I needed was nature. The kind of nature that, you know, is everywhere in California. Hence the NordicTrack.

This is what I came for. This is the last of a 12-ride Switzerland series. While the bike also offers draw-it-yourself maps courtesy of Google Street View, such that for a while I really was able to bike my old routes in California, they’re limited by the still images by which Google Street View is made — so you’re left with a staccato cascade of still images rather than a smooth video.

That’s where these pre-recorded videos come in, though. Led by fitness gurus who are no doubt internet influencers in their fields (I assume), you take the spot behind them, as recorded by a silent cameraman with, to judge by their occasionally visible shadows, something like a GoPro affixed to their helmets. You can bike through Chile, Turkey, France, New Zealand…there are road bike rides and mountain bike rides (my god, New Zealand mountain bikers don’t fuck around) and even rides that trace the routes of actual races.

I just finished the Swiss ride series and adored it. A few days of experimenting with different series after I got the bike made clear that a.) there are few male bike leaders that I can stand, as their vocabularies of encouragement are pretty limited and very he-man, b.) I am a sap for maternal cheering-on, and c.) yep, I still hate deserts. So much orange. Ugh.

When I found the Swiss series led by Ashley Paulson, who fills you in on historical tidbits about the area as you whizz through (of note, all the female iFit trainers do this; only one of the men whose rides I tried told you anything about the country you were riding through) I was enchanted. She’s like the cycling form of Molly Yeh — pink-haired, bubbly, full of energy and a hopelessly positive attitude. Sprinkles on a bike. Plus, she has four little kids, so my post-pregnant body didn’t feel like it was trying to limp along behind some 20-something goddess whose greatest bodily hardship was a spring break binge in college.

But when I crowed about this bike and specifically the outdoor riding recordings (as opposed to the studio sessions, which exist in all their heavily-produced glory, to compete with Peloton, but which feel oily and contrived) to, well, basically anyone who would listen, no one cared. Even physically fit people. Even cyclists!

Which led me to hazard a couple of guesses. One, of course, people who actually bike (should I say cycle? in my bike search pre-Black Friday, Google actually corrected my use of the verb “bike” to “cycle,” which seems absurdly pretentious until I remember how prickly runners are about “running” versus “jogging”) on real roads or trails have the predictable disdain for those who do it indoors. I get that. My preferred sport is running, after all (I decided to go the route of an indoor bike over a treadmill early on, because the latter is the number one piece of home gym equipment to break down, and there isn’t a damn thing you can fix yourself: you need a tech every time). I know how much I used to hate the idea of a treadmill, until I lived in an apartment complex that was basically a resort, with the most beautiful goddamn treadmills on the planet only two floors away every day. That cured me of my real-road-or-bust snobbery, but not many people are going to have that experience. I get that. My father-in-law, who has done RAGBRAI, for example, can be excused his lack of enthusiasm for the bike.

But everyone else — especially Gen-Xers and boomers — couldn’t understand how I could sit in front of a video recording of someone else riding a bike outdoors and feel anything approaching the level of awe I ought to feel if I were there myself. (“Oh, well I guess it’ll give you ideas of where to travel, huh?”) Which leads me to my second hypothesis: people who play video games are more willing to suspend their disbelief and accept the artificiality of the recorded rides, and to participate in them as “actual cyclists,” than those who do not game and have no experience willing themselves into another space as an active participant.

Consider the RingFit speedrunners, for example. This looks ludicrous to two groups of people: those who play games all the time but who have no interest in physical fitness, and their opposites, those who pursue physical fitness all the time but have zero interest in video games. But for people who sit in the middle doing both, that looks like a damn good time. Dangerous, sure. But — if your body can handle it — a damn good time. This is the same attraction marathons have for me, and for so many others. But if your only idea of working your body requires the outdoors (shitty at this time of year) or classes with someone yelling at you (expensive and demoralizing), you are repelled.

Well, the other day NordicTrack finally rolled out their Leaderboard functionality. You can indeed see yourself ranked against other people around the world, cycling that same route. It doesn’t appear to be real-time, but that’s okay: you can filter on gender, on real-vs.-adjusted difficulty (like hell am I pitting myself against those who notched the incline or resistance down), on age. Unsurprisingly, I don’t rank too well at the moment. I was pregnant for nine months and recovering from a giant hole cut in my body for four months afterward. I sit a solid 20 RPMs lower than any of the speeds Paulson calls for in her rides (on the flat-out stretches I mean; for whatever reason I’m more capable of matching her on the inclines than the faster parts), and even filtering out those who’ve adjusted their rides I’m surrounded mostly by those whose avatars report them being in their 40s and 50s (of course, these bikes are expensive, so there probably aren’t that many people my age who own them? but still). Of some 300 people biking that route, I sat at around 120 for most of the ride. Behind a guy in his 50s. At the end, though, I dragged my ass past him, finally breaking through the top 100 to sit in, uh, 98th place. Only for a few seconds, but still.

It’s something to work towards. And given that I’m already acclimated to that kind of competition from games, competing in the virtual Alps, or the virtual Appalachians or virtual Utah (except not there because ugh, deserts, no!), all has equal appeal for me. Even if I never get to feel the real wind on my face there.

we filled in the blanks

Posted on by metaphlame

Embittered and frightened by current events, sleepy during my too-late-at-night D&D session (don’t ask me to focus after 8PM), I on a whim searched for the text-based MMO Gemstone III, fondly recalled from my many sojourns in Elanthia in the 1990s, and found this article.

It’s six years old. But it’s good. His description of his dad making maps was a special stab to my heart — my mom used to always make maps of our games; somewhere in my garage I have still the tattered pad of graph paper bearing her pencilled-in maps for everything from King’s Quest 5 to Legend of Kyrandia to Inherit the Earth. She never played MMOs, though, and was extremely watchful of the amount of time I spent doing so. She distrusted bringing real-world strangers into one’s fantasy world. Her skepticism wasn’t misplaced, guess.

But that’s me going for the easy thing people can relate to. Losing one’s mother. This guy’s nostalgia for Gemstone III is harder to share the warmth of, if you weren’t neck-deep in such things in the 90s.

Those digital days roaming the Elanthian sea cliffs are authentic memories: they “count” for me in the same way that childhood days on the beach do. I used to be embarrassed about this, seeing it as evidence of a squandered adolescence bathed in cathode rays.

But I was neck-deep in such things. I recognize the initial embarrassment about “misspent youth” morphing with time, and predictably so, into nostalgia. And then the trying to…academize it into something respectable, lectureable, paper-worthy. I’ve done that. And while it’s not the same as artists monetizing everything they love to do and then realizing too late that nothing’s fun anymore…there is a comparison to be made there. The need to filter one’s experience through lenses one gets trained and then paid (albeit poorly) to slip over one’s eyes…the desperate, self-conscious need to have A Narrative. I recognize this.

But I also recognize Elanthia. And the simple joys it gave me at 13 — surely the shittiest age. I remember looking up words to properly compare the terrible gear that I had to the terrible gear I picked up — was a desiccated doublet worse than a frumpy one? And the damage I did — was it better to be mauled or to be evicerated?

I didn’t play nearly as long as Benjamin Breen did. I started on Gemstone’s noire sister game Modus Operandi, for starters, and then once I got deep into the Wheel of Time books it was all Tarmon Gai’don MUD, all the time. And then of course Everquest and the end of text-based adventures. But even though in Gemstone, as in MMOs today, the other real players were merely wallpaper for me…extras with whom I didn’t particularly want to interact in any intimate way…to hear someone recreate a walk through the game’s woods, noting that “the seriality of this writing was its strength”…it’s oddly comforting. I’m sure I ought to feel guilty for that, in the same way he notes feeling guilty for the hours spent in the actual game.

Now, more maybe than ever, we should all be aware of the dangers of nostalgia. If trying to remake today in the form of a stylized yesterday. But no one is going to bring back this way of play. Looking back fondly on it shouldn’t, I hope, hurt anyone. And the fact that somebody else, somewhere, is doing that — or was in 2014 — brings a weary sort of warmth. It wasn’t great writing in those games. But it allowed for a balance between the constraints of the system and the readerly imagination that I hadn’t yet encountered anywhere beyond Choose Your Own Adventure books. And where the game’s descriptive text left off, we picked up. We filled in the blanks, and it was enough.

fire lines

Posted on by metaphlame

Since living in California I read fire coverage intently. I was never in direct danger, it’s true (though people I worked with were), and I don’t think riding home under the gigantic gray plume shouldering its way up the other side of a mountain, or even emerging from my office into a mustardy haze coughing and rubbing my eyes, exonerates me from being labeled a little too fire-obsessed. I check maps. I watch videos taken from helicopters and panicky passengers in flame-ringed cars. I doggedly retweet analysis mapping the extraordinarily long fire seasons now onto climate change.

I live in the snow.

But this article makes a reference that clanged bells for me. “To Australians of a certain age…” Yes. Or to anyone whose history teacher offered extra credit for reading On the Beach. Which led me, as a twelve year old, to demand of my father why his government didn’t stockpile cyanide pills in case of a nuclear attack. So we could skip the slow painful breakdown of our bodies. Led me to wonder what I would want for a last meal, what would be simple and perfect and final, like the big stack of ham and cheese sandwiches on the seaside in the book. Led me never to look at a Ferrari the same way again.

Yesterday, before I even read this article, I slogged though wave after wave of pictures from Mallacoota. The sleepy Australian beach town where residents were told to gather on the wharf and leap into the sea when the alarms sounded, as the bushfires blocked off all exits and the ocean was the last escape. With a sleeping infant on top of me I saw dogs in masks and mothers paddling their little children out in rowboats to escape the flames under a murky blood-red sky. How would I get my five month-old safely into the ocean? I thought. Put him on something that floats and tie myself to it? What about rip tides? Regular tides? How would we keep from being washed away from a land on fire, so choked with smoke not even helicopters could see us? I thought of Dante’s Peak and The Mist. A movie I loathed — showing the ugliness of humanity, our failure to help one another in the face of catastrophe, seems superfluously cruel these days — and that wasn’t even with the original, worse ending. Where he shoots his son with his last bullet rather than let him suffer the predations of monsters, only to have the mist rise as he sits there sobbing, that nightmare over. The nightmare of the rest of his life just beginning. When I was told about this original, worst ending, I balked. “The fuck was he thinking,” I snapped. “Who wants to go on living after that? He should have laid his head up alongside his son’s.”

I spoke, then, based on knowledge I’d gained from books and articles about parents marooned by loss. Not from experience. Now — the other day, reading about fire after fire, families trapped, a father and son lost in a burning grove — I realize, with the effortless knowledge that water is wet and the sun is warm, that I don’t want to live in a world without my son in it. Very simple. Devastatingly so.

But watching these fires, I think we have presented him with a pretty shitty world to grow up in. I don’t want him to look at us in our decrepitude and think we have the easy way out. To demand why we never stockpiled pills or potions to soften his own too-soon exit from a doomed planet. I don’t want him to wheeze under sky the color of meat. I don’t want him to be running from flames. Or to be fighting them, soot-stained and grim. I don’t want him to wish he hadn’t been born. Or to ask why he had been, into a world on fire.