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So, GAME OF THRONES: ASCENT --

My feedback so far: everything takes too long. Sorry. I realize that two factors are at work here: (a) the programmers want people to buy speed ups, and (b) there is only so much story already done to work with so there is a need to pace us as we make our way through the narrative.

I'm not saying those things aren't important. I am saying, everything takes too long. Five minutes would be enough to give me the sensation of time going by; 45 minutes is just silly. I hit these points where everything is busy and it's half an hour until I can move on in any of the tracks I'm on and it's just frustrating.

I understand that tension is what a game is supposed to generate, and frustration is part of that tension... I've designed a lot of games myself. But a good game creates tension and then releases it in a satisfactory fashion. This is what we mean when we call a game or a book or a movie or a TV show 'good'... it creates tension, and then releases that tension in a manner we find satisfactory. If it doesn't create tension, it's boring. If it does create tension but does not release that tension in a manner we find satisfactory, then we find it frustrating, or we think the ending sucked, or whatever. Creating tension, and then releasing it satisfactorily, is the key to everything. If you can do that, you can make a million bucks in Hollywood, or, probably, in game design. But it's not as easy as it seems.

Creating tension is easy. Anyone can do it. The dollar bins at every book store, at every Game Stop, in the movie section of every Target and Wal-mart, are full of games and books and movies that created tension but did not release that tension in a satisfying fashion. Many video games rely on flashy graphics, awesome sound quality, terrific playability, tie ins to extremely popular fictional properties, to get by and generate revenue... just as many movies rely on nifty special effects, lots of violence, and boobies to sell tickets. But it still all comes down to -- does it create tension (which is easy, but many movies and games still fuck it up) and, having created that tension, does it release it in a satisfactory manner? This last bit is where all the money is. If it does, it's a great game/movie/book/whatever. If it doesn't... ultimately, it's a failure and a disappontment.

(It's worth noting that in terms of this game's source material, the jury is still very much out regarding whether or not this is a 'good' story or not. George R.R. Martin is producing a wonderful reading experience, but he's also kind of working a very elaborate con on us. Over the course of twenty years now, he's given us this extremely long drawn out process whereby all he's really done is the first part -- creating tension. That's all A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE has been so far... here's a cool setting. Here's all this nifty mysterious shit going on... the weird seasons, the bizarre monsters up Beyond The Wall, the apparent growing conflict between stasis and change/order and chaos/ice and fire... plus, all the personal mysteries regarding Jon Snow's lineage and Tyrion Lannister and what the hell is up with that stupid horn Sam is carrying around and a hundred other questions. It's all creating tension. Martin has done a masterful job of it... but can he release that tension in a satisfying manner? Can he give us a conclusion to this story that successfully resolves all of these mysteries and enigmas, that ties all of these various storylines and character bits and plot devices all together, and can he do it in a way that will satisfy us... which means, basically, in a way that (a) no one sees coming, but (b) when he finally presents it, everyone facepalms themselves and says "Of COURSE!!!! I should have seen that! That's BRILLIANT!!!"

Personally, I doubt he can do it... he's obviously already revising whatever his original plans and directions were for the characters and the story... he's obviously gone back and done this many times so far. Apparently, whenever Martin goes out on the internet and reads some post where some fan successfully guesses a plot development Martin has in mind, Martin throws a monumental hissy fit, rips up all the unpublished pages he's already done establishing that particular story direction, and starts over, because he just can't stand it when someone guesses what he's planning to do. And given that he obviously ego-searches the Internet constantly, this means that finishing this story is... well... unlikely, to say the least.

And the idea that he can possibly tie all these thousand thousand different threads up together in a manner that is satisfying and consistent... nah. There's no way.

But it doesn't matter, because the way he dicks around, he'll be dead before the next book is even finished. And in the meantime, this extended exercise in creating tension that we all call A SONG OF ICE AND FIRE has given George R.R. Martin about the most wonderful old age anyone could ever ask for. All his books are back in print, he gets paid vacations to Cons all over the world, he's got movie deals and commercial tie ins falling out of his ass, he's got hundreds of thousands of new sycophants and tons and tons of money... and if those few of us who have actually read his pre-GAME OF THRONES work kind of suspect that the man simply does not have the talent to write a finished ANYTHING that really satisfies... well, clearly, we're in the minority.

I don't think he really WANTS to finish the story. There's no real incentive for him to do it. There's no way he does it in a way that makes even a majority of his fans happy, and as soon as he does finish it, people stop paying attention to him. The money dwindles, but he's got to have enough of that to last him another hundred years he isn't going to live.

Mostly, though, he'll lose all the attention. No one will be inviting him to cons any more, and there won't be any more articles calling him "the American Tolkien".

No, I'm pretty sure Martin will die... very happily... before he ever wraps this thing up.

But if I'm wrong, there's simply no way he's going to release all the tension he's generated in a satisfactory fashion. The real Tolkien couldn't do it. C.S. Lewis couldn't do it. Roger Zelazny couldn't do it.

Sure as shit the guy who wrote TUF VOYAGING and THE ARMAGEDDON RAG can't do it.)

As to this game... so far, it generates tension fine. But when it comes to releasing tension satisfactorily... um... no. No, not so much.

This one aggravates me for half an hour, 45 minutes at a time, and then... hardly anything happens. I just move on to the next thing.

I'm also finding it tedious, skipping over all the actual adventuring and fighting and cool interactions.

In fact, now that I think of it, I don't want to run a Lord in Westeros. I want to run Kirth, that bard guy. He does all the cool stuff. And I want more details on what he does. I want the fights and the seductions and the sneaking around getting info. I don't want to run my mill and build a sept and all that nonsense. I'm not here to build and maintain a keep. I want to adventure.

Now, there may very well be people out there who like all the household stuff... God knows, Farmville is popular enough, and I'd never play it. But my feedback is, I just want to play Kirth.

In defense of Scott McCloud

So, in an unrelated comics thread commenting on an article linked to by Joe Staton, I praised the work of comics visionary, and one time college buddy of mine, Scott McCloud.

In response, old school comics hackmeister Marty Pasko took issue with my praise of Scott. He said:

"Sorry, Mr. Madigan, but I'd be willing to invest some time in trying to persuade you that your fealty to Scott O'Clude and his "Obfuscating Comics" is both regrettable and misguided.

I have zero interest in stirring up controversy for its own sake, and part of me would almost be grateful if this comment would go unnoticed, but I can't let some of the ignorant nonsense being bandied about here go unchallenged and yet sleep well tonight.

I've always had the utmost contempt for Scott Whatsisname's presumption in trying to set himself up as some sort of authority on the grammar of comics and the fundamentals of graphic storytelling, partly because his own work -- the silly, pointless, empty and creatively-bankrupt "Zot!" being the principal indictment of his fraudulence -- indicts his own credibility. The careful reading of his half-baked, supposedly knowledgeable texts by one who is a serious student of both the history and the current state of the form, AS WELL AS a seasoned practitioner of one of its disciplines, yields a strong conviction that Mr. O'Clude's primary claim to fame is as an egregious example of the principle of "Those Who Cannot Do, Teach."

I regret the fact that space, and the limited attention span of the readership I'd most want to reach, forbid my going into greater, more specific detail. It is my hope to be able to deconstruct, and savage, line by line, Mr. O'Clude's wrongheaded pomposities, as part of a highly personalized, one-on-one writing coaching service in both comics and animation storytelling that I'll be offering between now and this year's San Diego ComiCon, at which I'll be a guest.

Does that sentence mean I'm seizing an opportunity to try to sell you something? Yeah. You bet your ass, baby -- welcome to America. I have a bunch of majorly valuable experience and hard-won knowledge that I can download to you, you aspiring storyteller, you, that will give you a competitive advantage in securing paying gigs.

Watch this, uhm, space for further details...and a link to the site, now under construction, where it's gonna happen."

To which I responded as follows:

"Mr. Pasko -

No reason for you to give a shit, and certainly it shouldn't change your opinion. I'm a fan of Scott in great part because I know first hand that he's pretty much a genius; I had the privilege of being part of the same college clique he hung out with at Syracuse University. I learned a great deal from the best; him and Kurt Busiek. Kurt and I are no longer even remotely friends, but I know Kurt is a gifted writer (with some unfortunate limitations) and I know Scott is, well, a genius, both as an artist and as a comics analyst. Scott is a true visionary; one of the very few people I've ever met who can actually think originally and truly create new things.

And beyond that, where I would never say this about Kurt (unfortunately) I also know that Scott is a class act and a helluva fine human being. There's nothing mediocre about him. Only a terminal mediocrity would ever even think to associate that word with him.

I'm not going to discuss what I think about your writing over the years because it's not germane; I'm simply going to say, I've personally known far, far better writers than you, and been privileged to learn from them. In my opinion, of course. For what little it's worth. (Certainly as much as yours, though.)

ZOT! had some problems until the main character got stuck on our mundane Earth; the book needed that central conceptual contrast to really take off. Scott is, as I've mentioned, a genuinely innovative and original thinker and creator, which is a great deal more than I can say for you. Sorry, but I've read at least as much of your work as I've read of Scott's (or, for that matter, of my other college mentor, Kurt Busiek's) and you simply aren't in their class. Your denigrating words towards Scott strike me as insecurity at best and probably rank jealousy at worst... but either way, they are simply inaccurate.

I realize you're not going to hear/read this well... who would? And I realize you had no idea you were talking shit about someone I regard as a personal friend, mentor, and as one of the very few truly Great People I've ever actually met. And I also realize that probably makes me not at all unbiased about his work. But one of the many, many reasons I admire and respect Scott is not simply that he's a good friend and a great person, but also that he's an enormously talented artist.

Obviously, you can hold whatever opinion you want about whatever you want, and express it wherever you want. But any tiny vestigial respect I might have had for your judgment regarding creative matters or comic books is now utterly gone. I don't expect you to care about that... who the fuck am I, after all? A failure and a wannabe, I'm absolutely aware. But Scott McCloud is so far superior to you as a comics creator, analyst, and visionary, and, as far as I know, as a human being, that honestly, it's just pointless to even make the comparison. That you'd end a several hundred word bitch slap at a far, far better man by trying to get me to buy something of yours is just the final underscore on how much class you lack.

If I seem angry at your absolutely unmerited rudeness, well, you seem astonishingly boorish, avaricious, and opportunistic, so I guess we're even."

There was absolutely no need for Pasko to jump into that comment thread and shit all over Scott. The level of personal vitriol he spewed was completely unwarranted, and, again, I can only assume motivated by some kind of intense, nearly obsessive personal jealousy. Maybe Marty Pasko once had a huge crush on Scott's delightful wife Ivy, I don't know. Whatever the case, his actions were completely out of line, and for him to say that he has "a bunch of majorly valuable experience and hard-won knowledge" is about the most egregiously self serving and, obviously, utterly false to fact statement I've seen since the last Republican stump speech.

Pasko's writing has always been mediocre at best. Now I know why... he's a mediocre at best human being who is apparently eaten up with jealousy regarding a far, far better person than he will ever be.

The buffer

I like the buffer.

Normally I never get it... that feeling of comfort you get when you're off from work, and you know you don't have to go to work the following day, either.

Prior to my current job, where my days off are Sunday and Tuesday, and have been for almost a year now, I worked at another call center for nearly three years. It took me about a year at that call center to get enough seniority to get Sunday and Monday off with day time hours. (I had not yet managed to be able to reliably bid on Saturday and Sundays off when I left that job; shifts with weekends off and daytime hours are the Holy Grail of call center work, and are reserved for the very privileged elite at the very tip top of the seniority ladder.)

At my current call center, forget having Saturday and Sunday off... I've never seen a shift where anyone gets both those days. But just getting two days off in a row is a near impossibility. Which is why, when I accumulated a bunch of vacation and personal days in December of last year that I had to schedule, if not use, by the end of the month, since HR was changing their scheduling software and no one would guarantee that the days would continue to be available, I put them all on Mondays in January and February.

So for an oh too brief period which will soon be over, I get not just two days off in a row, but three days off in a row, most weeks. (I missed the first Monday in January and the first Monday in February because they were already scheduled up by other employees. But I got the rest of them.)

So Saturday night is pretty sweet, because I'm on the brink of a three day weekend and that's always a wonderful feeling. Sunday is awesome, because I've still got two days left. And Monday is pretty good, because there's always Tuesday.

But Tuesday just FLIES away...

I enjoy the buffer.

Upstairs, downstairs

Okay.

So, last night. Once again, the loud music, the sounds of voices, the gunshots and explosions coming down through the living room ceiling around 9:25, five minutes before the 13 year old daughter's bedtime. When I say 'loud', I mean, we could hear these sounds in the back bedroom. The loud noises have been a recurring motif lately and we've tried to ignore them, but she was complaining she couldn't sleep, so I did what I've learned is the only thing that works with the Asshole Upstairs - I called the cops on him. 

Now, when I say I've learned this, I mean, I've been up those stairs at least a dozen times in the last year and a half to ask him, with varying levels of courtesy, if he could please quiet down. It has never accomplished anything; all he does is roll his eyes at me, call me a control freak, and advise that he's in his apartment and he'll do whatever he wants. At various times in the past, in response to requests to be quieter, he's told us:

* we should buy a house out in the country
* we're not the landlord and therefore have no control over what goes on in his apartment
* my whole family should wear ear plugs
* we live in an apartment building and noise is going to happen
* it's just his lifestyle, bro

My wife has also gone upstairs numerous times and, I do not doubt in a much more civil fashion (because she's way classier than I am) asked him to quiet down, too. 

None of these requests have ever accomplished anything except to provide him with an opportunity to insult us. On a few occasions, he's actually gotten louder, just to show that We're Not The Boss Of Him, which it is extremely important that he demonstrate to us. On one memorable occasion, he and his 'besty', the slore who lives in the other upstairs apartment, actually waited for me to get back downstairs before beginning to jump up and down and scream like apes. After which, they went in his bedroom and jumped up and down on the bed and made loud simulated sex noises... which, since the youngest daughter was currently trying to sleep directly beneath, did not amuse us at all.

So what I've learned is, when he's being excessively noisy, I call the cops. When I call the cops, he shuts up... at least, for a while. 

So the cops finally showed up last night (cop, actually; sometimes one shows up, sometimes two) and went upstairs and asked him to quiet down. And he did turn the volume down a little... but five minutes after I got back to bed, he proceeded to STOMP up and down the hall running the length of his apartment... I mean, he was just BOOMIN up there, to make sure we knew he was displeased with us.

So today I resisted the urge, with some help from my wife, to go outside and gather up some of the shit his dog has left all over our backyard for the past year and a half, and deposit it all over the area in front of his front door. Because I didn't want to be that creep. 

And half an hour ago, there's a rap rap rap at the back door, and I open it, and the little turd is standing on my back porch. And he starts in: "You know, if you have a problem with the noise coming from my living room, just come up and tell me. Because I was within my rights with the agreement I made with your wife and the landlord -- "

"No," I said, pointing at him, "stop." He did, and I said "First, you have broken that agreement whenever you felt like it. The agreement no longer exists, you have had parties and been noisy far later than you were supposed to; if I don't call the cops to shut you down you'll keep going all night. Second -- I have tried to be a good neighbor to you. I came up those stairs a dozen times before I ever called the cops and every time what happened? You insulted me and never ever quieted down... occasionally, you just jumped up and down and screamed. And the last time I came up, you ordered me off your porch. So get off my porch."

"You're SO gross," he told me. "Fine. But you can't harass me."

"I'm not harassing you," I told him as he retreated off the porch. "You're a child and calling the cops is the only thing that works when you create a problem so hear me on this: I will call the cops EVERY TIME. Because you've taught me and you've taught my wife that it's the only way to get you to behave like a grown up, however briefly."

"Why are you such a miserable man?" he asked. "You can't harass me like this."

"Another thing," I said, "that agreement you're talking about? One of the conditions of it was your promise that you'd be gone by the end of summer if we just 'hung in there' with you. And you're still here. You're a liar and a child and as it is the only thing that works with you, I will call the cops EVERY TIME."

My voice was shaking pretty badly. Even at the age of 51, I cannot keep my voice steady when I'm emotional.

I still have a hard time believing he had the temerity to come up and mention that 'agreement' to me. In addition to establishing 'quiet times' in the house (which he's ignored whenever he felt like it), he also agreed to keep his dog on a leash outside his apartment and to clean up after her... which he has NEVER done. Plus, there's the whole thing where he was supposed to be gone by the end of summer, and here it is, the middle of the following February and the little shit is still fucking around with us. 

'Harass' him. He has no idea what 'harassment' is. 

Know what I caught him doing back in December? I was downstairs doing laundry when the side window into the basement opens and in he slides with a full laundry bag. When I asked him what he was doing, he said "Oh, my key doesn't work in the lock of the basement door, so I just come in and out by the window."

Now, another one of our big beefs with him and the slore upstairs is that they find it very inconvenient to keep the basement door locked. In fact, their preference would be to leave it unlocked all the time. However, the basement gives direct access to our apartment (which, of course, they don't give a shit about). And there have been a lot of break ins in our neighborhood, and the cops have advised people that the usual point of entry is the basement. So we've bitched and bitched and bitched to our landlord about it, and they've whined and whined and whined that their keys don't work in the basement lock, which is bullshit... they just dislike having to put their laundry down to unlock and then relock the door when they go in and go back out. 

However, the landlord came down solidly on our side on that one, going so far as to say that if he had to put another lock on that door, he wouldn't be giving out ANY keys... meaning we'd be the only people in the house with basement access. That shut them up... so, rather than use his key, the dickhead was just coming in through the window. 

Of course, he wasn't going back OUT through the window, that was another lie. He as just coming in that way, and then unlocking the door from the inside and going back out through it... leaving it unlocked whenever he did so.

So I nailed that window shut. It took me three times, as he kept forcing it open, but I finally got it secured. And guess what? His key works just fine now.

I don't know what he's going to do about me 'harassing' him by calling the police whenever he's in violation of the noise ordinance. But if he's got the sheer vacuous cluelessness to call the landlord and complain, well, the landlord has ignored OUR complaints for pretty much eighteen months or so. And if he wants to get in it, my wife and I are happy to have another chat about what an inconsiderate tenant he has living over us.

Brown out

So. The Brown Hotel, in lovely downtown Louisville, KY:

Lovely place. Comfortable bed. Nice chair. I won't say the room struck me as spectacular; in fact, less expensive places I've stayed in have seemed better equipped, with microwaves and little fridges and stuff. But I guess when you pay more you get less practicality, more ambiance.

The staff seemed very intent on letting us know as pleasantly as possible that we were working class riff raff who didn't belong there, and while the law might require them to admit us, we should never ever forget that this was not our proper place. The very polished looking fellow stationed at the door outside the elegant lobby bar snickered when he saw the large YMCA logo on the black canvas suitcase I was lugging, and the sleek, expensive looking redhead behind the desk was happy to announce in a loud, carrying voice that I was using a debit card, rather than a credit card, when we checked in. She did, however, give me a break when it turned out that the discount room rate I had found searching around on the web was an American Automotive Association rate, and I am not a member; she sort of sneered and said "Well, I guess we can let it go just this once." Which was very human of her. I'm sure it strained something deep inside her, but I appreciated it.

(I just went to some discount room search sites. I had never done it before; I had no idea it was an AAA only discount.)

Then I woke up the next morning after we watched PROMETHEUS for twelve bucks on their in house cable, and discovered our invoice had been pushed under the door during the night, and apparently, my wife and I had gone down to that oh so elegant bar and drunk $66 worth of liquor. Which was a fabulous trick, since we hadn't left the room at all after arriving in it. (My first reaction was that I would have a difficult time imagining $66 worth of liquor, much less drinking it, but then I reflected that this was the Brown Hotel, and it would probably not take Han Solo's imagination to encompass $66 worth of elegant Brown Hotel lobby bar liquor. In fact, probably that android from PROMETHEUS could imagine it fairly easily.)

The room was a little noisier than I would have liked for the discount enormous price that I paid, and I'd honestly expected that a place like the Brown would have nicer accoutrements -- towels, glasses, and such -- than the typical hotel fare that was actually there. But we did get breakfast in our room, and the bacon was amazing, which it should have been, for what it cost.

The guy at the front desk when we went down was much more pleasant than the chick from the night before, perhaps because we were leaving. But he did take the erroneous bar check off our tab without protest.

All told, it was a lovely experience, but the folks who run the Brown, and their preferred patrons, need to study their history. Specifically, the French Revolution.

Aggravation

People like to say stuff like "It all boils down to this" and then they throw out whatever their particular favorite scapegoat is. Hatred. Intolerance. Ignorance. Greed. Original sin. Lack of patriotism. Homosexuality. Whatever.


However, the basic underlying fundamental issue of all human problems is none of these things.

It's that there are way too many goddamned people out there who will not do what I want them to.

You know who you are, too.

Check yourselves.



* * * *



Now, I posted the above in an attempt to be humorous. But honestly, the above is, probably, one of the major contributors to most human conflicts -- not the idea expressed by the post, but the attitude that the post embodies.

Dig it -- I get aggravated with your shit just as much as you get aggravated with my shit. And you can substitute any one particular proper noun for either or both parties in the above sentence. The LGBT community is aggravated with Orson Scott Card's nonsense. Wall Street Bankers are currently affronted by the temerity of Senator Elizabeth Warren daring to ask them some real questions about financial regulation. (Who the fuck does she think she is? Doesn't she know they pay her salary?) The Tea Party is sick to death of that uppity Negro Barack Obama. Karl Rove has had it up to here with the Tea Party messing up his plans for a permanent Republican majority.

And 'Joliet' Jake Blues hates the Illinois Neo Nazis.

And on and on and on and on.


A lot of crap annoys me too. I would like to tailor a virus that would remove forever from our television screens the horrifying social carcinoma that is reality TV. I would enjoy it if the Tea Party would launch itself into orbit on jets of its own concentrated bile. I think we should probably airdrop the entire membership of the Westboro Baptist Church into the Andes mountains, preferably without parachutes.

But I don't get to do that. And it's right that I don't get to do that, because while all these things are aggravating, none of them are actually causing me real, demonstrable harm. They annoy me. They aggravate me. They infuriate me. Sometimes they even hurt my feelings. But they are not shooting at me, menacing me with broken beer bottles, spreading roofing tacks in my driveway, vandalizing my property, setting fire to my furniture, or assaulting my children.

They're just talking.

I read stuff on Facebook that says, like, 'Kanye West should be banned from the Grammies for life'. And I go, 'yeah, Kanye West is a douchebag and he acts like a douchebag and if I were running the Grammies I'd probably refuse him admittance at the door'. But what did he do? He got up and acted like an asshole. He... talked.

Yeah, he made a lot of people mad and probably hurt Taylor Swift's feelings and I'm not saying that was okay, but I am saying, maybe we want to stop and think before we start saying "He did something that made us mad and hurt someone's feelings, so now he must be banned for life".

One of Robert A. Heinlein's nuttier beliefs, while alive, was "an armed society is a polite society". Heinlein genuinely believed that if you want people to be civil, you needed to legalize dueling. His reasoning, if one can use such a grand word for such an obviously completely emotional non-thought process, was that if there are possible consequences to being impolite, then people will stop being impolite... or, at least, there will be considerably less impoliteness, because rude people will get shot and then they won't be rude any more.

Now, think about that. When you boil that down to its basics, what Heinlein (and quite a few others I've read over the years who agree with him) is saying is, if someone is rude to me, I should be able to shoot that motherfucker.

It should be legal to murder someone because they said something that pissed you off.

This is madness. If you can't see that it's madness, then you probably need to stop reading this essay, because you're probably wishing that you could legally shoot me for offending you, and there's just no talking to you.

A great many people seem to feel this way... not that, you know, they should be able to haul out a gun and murder anyone who offends them in any way, but that, you know, they SHOULD be able to take otheractions against such people. That 'hate speech' -- which means, pretty much, anything that offends any one particular person or group of people who have the ears of a majority of legislators -- should be illegal. That boycotts should be organized to keep writers with controversial political opinions from being published in certain venues.

That homosexuals shouldn't be allowed to teach, because, presumably, their 'gay cooties' will get on our kids.

If any of these things seem ludicrous to you, and you are a reasonable and mature and fair minded person, then ALL of these things should seem ludicrous to you.

If you're offended by the notion that gay people shouldn't be allowed to teach (or marry each other), but you think it's just great to try to put pressure on a major publisher to not publish work by an author whose political views you intensely dislike... you're a hypocrite.

It's hard to really, really genuinely support freedom of speech. Freedom of expression. Equal access to the law. Equal opportunity. It really is. For most people, there's always a "Yes, but". I'm all about freedom of speech, yes, but... not for the Illinois Neo Nazis, because I hate them. I'm all for equal access to opportunity, yes... but... not for Orson Scott Card, because he's a bigot and I hate him. I'm all for equal access to the law, but... not for homosexuals, because it's Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.

And I'm a firm believer in complete freedom of expression, but, you know, let's get real... the Westboro Baptist Church is a bunch of douchebags, and Kanye West is an asshole, so, you know, let's find a way to shut those guys up.

We would all like to live in a world where no one ever does anything to offend or irritate or annoy or anger us. We would all like to go through our lives and never ever ever under any circumstances encounter or perceive or in any way interact with anything that makes us feel threatened or affronted or alienated or in any way uncomfortable. We'd all like that.

But if we're adults, we don't expect it. We know it's not reasonable to expect everyone else in the world to make our feelings and sensibility a priority in their day to day existence. We understand that we really cannot presume to tell other people how they can dress, where they can go, what they can say, what they're allowed to think.

As a grown up, I understand that I have to take some responsibility for my own emotional responses to things, especially when my emotional response is something along the lines of outrage or repulsion. Essentially, my dividing line is a simple one: if I don't think someone is deliberately trying to offend me, and they're not actually causing me or someone else I care about harm, well, then, I try hard not to lose my shit.

On the other hand, if someone is deliberately trying to provoke or offend me, well, the onus shifts. Those who choose to behave in a manner that they have calculated will probably inflame the passions of others should not be surprised when their efforts are successful. Making someon else love, admire, or respect you is often difficult; making someone else really really REALLY pissed off at you is easy.

But, again... as a grown up, I have to take some responsibility for my own umbrage.

If you're coming at me to cause me physical harm or death, or to damage or harm my legitimate possessions and/or interests, then I have a right to take action to stop you, or to expect the society I am part of to take action on my behalf to protect me.

But if you're just talking shit and pissing me off, well... not so much.

Even if you're doing it on purpose, hoping to piss me off... well, that's on you, but, it's also on me. I need to be a grown up about it.

We need to stop talking so much about ways to keep other people from offending us. We need to work on not being so easily offended.

At least, if we genuinely want to live in a free society, we do.