“Men are the prize,” declares man who is very clearly not a prize

The idea that the majority of women in the past spent their days puttering around the house doing … whatever, we don’t need to know the details of what they did, it wasn’t as important as the Great Men and the Wars and the Buildings and whatnot – is such ahistorical BS. At least in the West (I don’t know as much about other parts of the world, shame on me) women worked a lot of different jobs: farming, brewing, crafting, running businesses, teaching, healing, writing manuscripts, managing large households, etc. There were a few decades in the twentieth century when middle-class married women weren’t supposed to work outside the home, but that’s it.

https://going-medieval.com/2019/05/30/on-women-and-work/

Weeks without anything of the sort. Then four days straight of frequent, disruptive interruptions. Obviously something changed four days ago. I didn’t start doing anything differently on that date, so this change is external to me. The weather has been all over the map during those four days, but was not exceptionally inclement at the times of any of the interrupting events, and there had been similar weather during the preceding several weeks at various times, so it cannot be explained as a change in the weather. Which leaves the choices of humans other than me. It follows that somewhere out there is a human who decided, four days ago, to change something, and a consequence of that decision is that I have since then been frequently interrupted and my tasks disrupted where that had not been occurring before said decision.

I want that human held accountable for the consequences of the choice they made four days ago, and forced to reverse their decision of four days ago and put everything back as it had been previous to that time by undoing whatever it is that they did four days ago.

There’s nothing paranoid about this. It all follows logically from the observational data. Someone changed something, that change is evidently having hugely disruptive effects on the infrastructure serving my home, that change is therefore bad, and they should therefore be compelled to reverse that change.

Indeed, the change — whatever it is — is not merely bad, it is illegal; I did not sign any agreement to any reduction in quality of service of any kind, so any such reduction carried out unilaterally by a utility I’ve contracted with constitutes a breach of that contract on their part, and if a third party has caused the reduction they are guilty of tortious interference with that contract. In either case, the responsible party has committed a civil tort against me. I have the right to sue them for what they’ve done, if it comes to that.

And, of course, if it was done deliberately and with malice aforethought, it constitutes harassment. That they have not figured out that they screwed up and undone it of their own volition after four days is strong evidence that they are doing it intentionally.

Consider this: if someone steps on your toes once and promptly says “Oops, sorry about that!” and is then careful not to do it again, then it was likely an accident and to call it deliberate would be paranoid. But if they do it repeatedly, don’t apologize, and you said “ouch!” the first three times and yet they kept doing it, it would be fair to assume it was happening in bad faith at that point, and indeed it would take an uncommon degree of gullibility not to decide by then that the toe-stepper was being, at best, purposely negligent (that is, they did not care if they stepped on people’s toes and just barged around in the full knowledge that they’d get someone’s tootsies every so often, but didn’t aim at anyone’s in particular) and, given that yours in particular got hit four times in a short interval, they probably were aiming at you on purpose.

@Surplus – Yes, but you don’t know if it was the mistake of one person or several, or a failure of the machinery, etc. And an electrical outage almost certainly wasn’t aimed at you in particular, as it would affect other people on your block. I mean, it sucks and it makes sense to be frustrated, but I doubt it’s personal.

But I’m one to talk. I’m currently a bit disappointed since I just got a poem rejected after deciding to be more proactive about sending stuff. Now, I’m not entirely convinced I’m good at poetry in general, but some people liked this one when I read it out loud, so I was foolishly thinking, “Eh, it’s good and I’m sending it to a tiny little journal, so they’ll probably just publish it, why not!!”

Yeah, no. But it doesn’t mean the thing is horrible. Maybe it’s just that my poetry style is kind of goofy usually, and people want something more serious. But then there are some amazing writers, and I’m just, “How do you do that with words???” so I’m probably not the best either.

@ epitome

@epitome

As a frustrated writer who became a journalist instead, and in the same line as Alan’s evidence, I can share this bit of wisdom: publishers are NOT the measure of good writing.

I know one can’t really become an author if no one publishes one’s work,but STILL. Publishers suck at telling good writing from bad. They look at what can be sold. And even then, they often misjudge. Badly.

@Alan

I’m more of a copyleft person myself, but as long as there is intellectual property, I’m 100% for animals owning their work.

@Alan

Oh, I agree.
Humans may have helped them with the shape, but the bees did the actual work.

@Luzbelitx

Oh yes, I know what you mean.
Whenever I think of how many amazing poems and stories are rejected each day I fume.
It’s the same with movies or television shows.
Good, amazing ideas are rejected for repeats of what is known to bring in money.

@Alan
Only for that specific expression of the idea certainly, and even then only partially. The London Philharmonic may have rights to their recording of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, but Beethoven still gets full credit for the original score.

@Alan, “Nigel Topnbottom”?

@ moggie

There’s much mystery about that letter. Brian Epstein stuck by the story; and said the decision was justified on the basis of the Beatles’ terrible audition. Dick Rowe, the head of A&R at Decca however said it wasn’t his decision. He said he asked a chap called Mike Smith to choose between the Beatles and the Tremeloes. Smith went with the latter just for convenience sake. They lived nearer.

The relevant parties all knew each other though so the letter may well have been an in-joke.

The fact is though, Decca did turn them down!

@ Surplus

But by sheer virtue of living in society, you are in essence in the middle of a crowd getting your toes stepped on by random people who didn’t even look in your direction while they are driven to and fro by wind and rain, earthquakes, crumbling flooring… this analogy is getting away from me, but this honest belief on your part every other post that a particular someone/organization/upper power is intentionally/maliciously focusing on you and usually you alone is… questionable at best. (No, I will not be convinced by your six page essay on all the fairly mundane problems that happen to you on a not statistically significant basis.)

As for the original post, well it puts me in mind of the old line “Optimists think we live in the best of all worlds. Pessimists also think that.” What if MGTOW really has helped this guy become the best man he can be?

@GSS ex-noob

If I remember one of David’s finds correctly, some slightly boiled green beans are acceptable MGTOW fare, insolong as they accompany something manly, like steaks that barely touched the pan.

@Dalillama, @Luzbelitx, @Alan – aw, thanks for the kind words!! (and pictures – I have mixed feelings about Plath as a person, but she could definitely write).

I guess my frustration was more about the fact that I let small things upset me and then I avoid stuff/waste time. But y’all are right – I shouldn’t get discouraged. When I try to get people interested in my novel it’s going to be much much more work.

@Threp – I was going to suggest a journal to you, but then I remembered it went out of business. 🙁 (It was called Storyteller – it was based in Canada and published short genre fiction.)

I wonder if there’s anything specializing in adventure-type stories? Today when I was making a list of writing magazines, I found a few focused on SFF and horror.

@Epitome of Incomprehensibility:

Yes, but you don’t know if it was the mistake of one person or several, or a failure of the machinery, etc.

A step-function change, such as occurred four days ago, very likely has a single cause. Any other explanation has to invoke “coincidence”: two separate entities decided to start treating me worse at the exact same time, on the same single day during a span of months or more.

@mouse sparrow:

Nothing is foolproof and works as expected every minute of every hour of every day.

True, but random failures (and bad weather, etc.) are random. The problems I have that are attributable to “nothing is foolproof” should be distributed fairly evenly over time. Large step-function changes in my quality of life can only result from two types of cause: a single huge thing (e.g., were I to get a cancer diagnosis or some such, or a tornado struck my home, or etc.) or else a change in policy somewhere (private or public sector) that throws me (and perhaps a larger chunk of the population) under the bus.

There’s no identifiable isolated, natural cause for the recent incidents along the lines of a tornado or whatever, so it’s a policy shift somewhere that happened four days ago and has resulted in reduced QoS from at least two utility companies in my area. Likely it was a Ford regime decision lowering standards for utility providers, that they were all quick to exploit to start cutting costs by cutting corners, given that there’s no logical reason for the phone and electric companies to collude directly with each other as they are not nominally in competition with each other.

Actually, there may be an even earlier sign of this QoS reduction. Which makes sense: it would take time for reduced preventive maintenance to cause enough cumulative damage to start causing service outages. Things would spend at least a few days quietly rusting, wearing thin, running low on coolant or lube, etc., before something actually snapped.

Starting about two weeks ago, the electronic program guide on my TV service started lying to me. Its listings started to be very much less reliable than before in predicting what I’d actually find if I tuned in any particular channel at any particular time. Its accuracy fell through the floor, from no errors in several months and maybe one or two a year for the past several years to literally hundreds of errors in the span of two weeks.

The TV service and internet here come from the same giant greedy megacorp.

So, the actual policy change reducing quality control at utilities was probably two weeks ago, or a bit more. They immediately fired their double-checker for the program guide (and errors promptly started proliferating there) and also immediately started skimping on maintenance of the infrastructure. The hydro company also did the latter. The maintenance corner-cutting took until four days ago to start causing power failures, and until one day ago to start causing glitchy networking that freezes my modem.

Unfortunately, a google search for “ontario government utility regulation” scoped to the past month doesn’t turn up any obvious candidates in the first page of results. Most likely the press has been silent, complicit with the interests of the wealthy as is so often the case these days, but it seems to have flown below the radar of activist groups as well. Someone with better research tools might be able to find out exactly what happened.

Whenever I think of how many amazing poems and stories are rejected each day I fume.

It’s the same with movies or television shows.

Good, amazing ideas are rejected for repeats of what is known to bring in money.

I’ve been thinking about this, and related things, for a while now. The related things include:

• The melting pot of social media, in which nothing gets much attention except if you’re famous.
• The uselessness of online dating, where you’re thrown up against three or four billion competitors and inevitably won’t rank in the top 10.
• The overall atomization of society.

The issue is the same: the “global village” is a cacophonous mob in which no individual voice can be heard unless they have a megaphone. Which the wealthy can buy and the already-famous can borrow, but nobody else will have one.

The problem is too much competition, so you only ever hear from the best of the best (or, often, the best self-promoters, or those backed by shadowy wealthy forces, even when mediocre; and a smattering of, essentially, lottery winners).

What we have here is a scaling problem, combined with a winner-take-all, all-or-nothing system for allocating attention.

The solution has to involve some kind of relocalization. Some of it in meatspace, through a revitalization of the physical public commons — we need a physical space that isn’t corporate-owned and run for private profit, is oriented around gathering and socializing rather than just-passing-through, and isn’t monopolized by one particular belief system (unlike most remaining legacy such spaces, which tend to be churches plus a smattering of things like Masonic lodges and whatnot).

I’m wondering if the public libraries could be revitalized in some way. They’d need to branch out, and there’d need to be parts that lay outside of the “Shhh! People reading” zone, if people are to socialize there. This would require expanding them physically, adding a few “lounge” areas (some “shh” reading/study oriented, some not, built so sound from the latter won’t readily carry to the former) and maybe activity things (board games, jigsaw puzzles, a snack machine or two) to attract people even when there aren’t already other people there. Free, minimally-regulated WiFi a must.

Even this might have scaling issues; ideally there’d be a public lounge space in every city block and, in denser areas, one per apartment building, though the latter can’t be in the building except if the building is public housing if it is to not be a privately-owned-for-profit space. One single one in a town of 20,000 people would not cut it.

(It’s odd that cities have public outdoor parks, but no indoor equivalent for things that either just work better indoors away from wind and bugs in general, and for during bad weather.)

Online, there needs to be something similar. There’s a well known phenomenon of online spaces working well until they get popular, and then going to hell in a handcart and ending up either a smoking crater (AOL, Usenet, MySpace), a recruiting ground for fascists (Reddit and the chans), or a homogenized, bland, monetized corporate space (Facebook, Tumblr, DeviantArt, YouTube, assorted MMORPGs). The latter fate often follows acquisition by a large tech corporation (Google being a recurring culprit), though Facebook simply grew into a large tech corporation once it bumped off its only serious competitor, MySpace.

The way to avoid this would seem to have been discovered, ironically, by the giant tech corporations behind the MMORPGs: instanced dungeons. No, I’m serious. We need a way to let the community become multiple communities instead of huge and homogenized, and having it make most of the people invisible to most of the other people (most of the time) outside some little circle seems to be the key. Facebook actually almost managed it. It has groups, but those are topic specific (much like churches, and corporate-owned meatspace venues; where what we need is explicitly topic-free spaces), and it has friending, but it’s individual and atomizing. Hypothetically we’d want a Facebook-alike where one has groups not by topic but just of people. The oft-leveled criticism of echo chambers is actually what we would be aiming for here, or perhaps even just random. But the idea is to have something like a bunch of topic-less “rooms” or something with a capacity limit of some sort, say 100, and automatic removal for a long enough period of inactivity. There’d also have to be a way to eject troublemakers; perhaps a person can propose to mute or boot someone, and the system displays nothing to anyone else about this but if a second person proposes to mute or boot the same someone within a short enough interval of time, then it puts it up for a vote, and a 2/3 supermajority or something can vote to eject someone from the room for an amount of time that escalates on repeated bootings from the same room within a short period. (There’d also have to be site-wide bans for serious stuff: hacking attempts, large scale commercial spamming, illegal porn uploading, etc., with a Wikipedia-like rotating board of arbitrators empowered to “peek” into any activity on the site to deal with such matters.)

The hope would be that the “rooms” (and anyone could spawn a new one or join a non-full one) would attract people to self-organize into ones that formed into communities of people with similar interests or outlooks, who could simply socialize there. The size cap would have to be large enough that there would usually be a few active members online at any given time and small enough that it wouldn’t become a cacophony of competition for attention. Auxiliary features might include DMs and perhaps some assortment of games: quizzes, cards, chess, etc. (no stakes and no scorekeeping that persists after a single game — we don’t want it to become too competitive). There’d also be a limit on how many rooms someone could be a member of at one time, though maybe one could lurk (read, but not participate) at any of them. (If someone wants privacy, that’s what DMs are for.)

Of course, it would take someone with money and resources beyond those available to me to take a stab at building any of this … and it would need a defense against takeover and homogenization by the megacorps. This means it would almost certainly have to be a user-owned cooperative, or else backed by a non-profit similar to the Wikimedia Foundation and the Free Software Foundation. The former would mean having a paid membership tier, but that needn’t confer any privileges beyond a “paid member” badge on one’s public profile and, of course, voting rights in sitewide administrative decisionmaking. A paid membership tier is probably needed anyway to generate revenue to keep it running, given that it ought to be a fully noncommercial space, which means no ads and no monetizing of other sorts (e.g. selling user data).

In the longer run, there need to be smaller scale (municipal, or even neighborhood) live venues, museums, galleries, and publishers as well, so that artists are not immediately thrown into competition with the entire planet (or the English-speaking subset, or etc.) if they want to get a foot in the provebial door. These probably do need to allow some forms of monetization, though they should also be publicly subsidized and free or very low cost at the point of entry for public browsing and consumption. Monetization could perhaps be accomplished by selling originals and print/physical copies, with digital being free; sales revenue being divided between the venue/publisher and the author in some way. These venues too would ideally be non-profit, unlike the legacy publishing industry, recording industry, and Hollywood, allowing the digital tier to be free and the split with the author to be more generous to the author than with the legacies.