#(and will doubtless say the same thing in a decade about current me)

[skollwolf]

I know I wrote Blinding back in like 2013 but even to this day my villain origin story is when people comment that they're glad Tony has a happy ending in it

[a-room-of-my-own]

This isn’t an easy piece to write, for reasons that will shortly become clear, but I know it’s time to explain myself on an issue surrounded by toxicity. I write this without any desire to add to that toxicity.

For people who don’t know: last December I tweeted my support for Maya Forstater, a tax specialist who’d lost her job for what were deemed ‘transphobic’ tweets. She took her case to an employment tribunal, asking the judge to rule on whether a philosophical belief that sex is determined by biology is protected in law. Judge Tayler ruled that it wasn’t.

My interest in trans issues pre-dated Maya’s case by almost two years, during which I followed the debate around the concept of gender identity closely. I’ve met trans people, and read sundry books, blogs and articles by trans people, gender specialists, intersex people, psychologists, safeguarding experts, social workers and doctors, and followed the discourse online and in traditional media. On one level, my interest in this issue has been professional, because I’m writing a crime series, set in the present day, and my fictional female detective is of an age to be interested in, and affected by, these issues herself, but on another, it’s intensely personal, as I’m about to explain.

All the time I’ve been researching and learning, accusations and threats from trans activists have been bubbling in my Twitter timeline. This was initially triggered by a ‘like’. When I started taking an interest in gender identity and transgender matters, I began screenshotting comments that interested me, as a way of reminding myself what I might want to research later. On one occasion, I absent-mindedly ‘liked’ instead of screenshotting. That single ‘like’ was deemed evidence of wrongthink, and a persistent low level of harassment began.

Months later, I compounded my accidental ‘like’ crime by following Magdalen Burns on Twitter. Magdalen was an immensely brave young feminist and lesbian who was dying of an aggressive brain tumour. I followed her because I wanted to contact her directly, which I succeeded in doing. However, as Magdalen was a great believer in the importance of biological sex, and didn’t believe lesbians should be called bigots for not dating trans women with penises, dots were joined in the heads of twitter trans activists, and the level of social media abuse increased.

I mention all this only to explain that I knew perfectly well what was going to happen when I supported Maya. I must have been on my fourth or fifth cancellation by then. I expected the threats of violence, to be told I was literally killing trans people with my hate, to be called cunt and bitch and, of course, for my books to be burned, although one particularly abusive man told me he’d composted them.

What I didn’t expect in the aftermath of my cancellation was the avalanche of emails and letters that came showering down upon me, the overwhelming majority of which were positive, grateful and supportive. They came from a cross-section of kind, empathetic and intelligent people, some of them working in fields dealing with gender dysphoria and trans people, who’re all deeply concerned about the way a socio-political concept is influencing politics, medical practice and safeguarding. They’re worried about the dangers to young people, gay people and about the erosion of women’s and girl’s rights. Above all, they’re worried about a climate of fear that serves nobody – least of all trans youth – well.

I’d stepped back from Twitter for many months both before and after tweeting support for Maya, because I knew it was doing nothing good for my mental health. I only returned because I wanted to share a free children’s book during the pandemic. Immediately, activists who clearly believe themselves to be good, kind and progressive people swarmed back into my timeline, assuming a right to police my speech, accuse me of hatred, call me misogynistic slurs and, above all – as every woman involved in this debate will know – TERF.

If you didn’t already know – and why should you? – ‘TERF’ is an acronym coined by trans activists, which stands for Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminist. In practice, a huge and diverse cross-section of women are currently being called TERFs and the vast majority have never been radical feminists. Examples of so-called TERFs range from the mother of a gay child who was afraid their child wanted to transition to escape homophobic bullying, to a hitherto totally unfeminist older lady who’s vowed never to visit Marks & Spencer again because they’re allowing any man who says they identify as a woman into the women’s changing rooms. Ironically, radical feminists aren’t even trans-exclusionary – they include trans men in their feminism, because they were born women.

But accusations of TERFery have been sufficient to intimidate many people, institutions and organisations I once admired, who’re cowering before the tactics of the playground. ‘They’ll call us transphobic!’ ‘They’ll say I hate trans people!’ What next, they’ll say you’ve got fleas? Speaking as a biological woman, a lot of people in positions of power really need to grow a pair (which is doubtless literally possible, according to the kind of people who argue that clownfish prove humans aren’t a dimorphic species).

So why am I doing this? Why speak up? Why not quietly do my research and keep my head down?

Well, I’ve got five reasons for being worried about the new trans activism, and deciding I need to speak up.

Firstly, I have a charitable trust that focuses on alleviating social deprivation in Scotland, with a particular emphasis on women and children. Among other things, my trust supports projects for female prisoners and for survivors of domestic and sexual abuse. I also fund medical research into MS, a disease that behaves very differently in men and women. It’s been clear to me for a while that the new trans activism is having (or is likely to have, if all its demands are met) a significant impact on many of the causes I support, because it’s pushing to erode the legal definition of sex and replace it with gender.

The second reason is that I’m an ex-teacher and the founder of a children’s charity, which gives me an interest in both education and safeguarding. Like many others, I have deep concerns about the effect the trans rights movement is having on both.

The third is that, as a much-banned author, I’m interested in freedom of speech and have publicly defended it, even unto Donald Trump.

The fourth is where things start to get truly personal. I’m concerned about the huge explosion in young women wishing to transition and also about the increasing numbers who seem to be detransitioning (returning to their original sex), because they regret taking steps that have, in some cases, altered their bodies irrevocably, and taken away their fertility. Some say they decided to transition after realising they were same-sex attracted, and that transitioning was partly driven by homophobia, either in society or in their families.

Most people probably aren’t aware – I certainly wasn’t, until I started researching this issue properly – that ten years ago, the majority of people wanting to transition to the opposite sex were male. That ratio has now reversed. The UK has experienced a 4400% increase in girls being referred for transitioning treatment. Autistic girls are hugely overrepresented in their numbers.

The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it. However, her career took a similar hit to that suffered by Maya Forstater. Lisa Littman had dared challenge one of the central tenets of trans activism, which is that a person’s gender identity is innate, like sexual orientation. Nobody, the activists insisted, could ever be persuaded into being trans.

The argument of many current trans activists is that if you don’t let a gender dysphoric teenager transition, they will kill themselves. In an article explaining why he resigned from the Tavistock (an NHS gender clinic in England) psychiatrist Marcus Evans stated that claims that children will kill themselves if not permitted to transition do not ‘align substantially with any robust data or studies in this area. Nor do they align with the cases I have encountered over decades as a psychotherapist.’

The writings of young trans men reveal a group of notably sensitive and clever people. The more of their accounts of gender dysphoria I’ve read, with their insightful descriptions of anxiety, dissociation, eating disorders, self-harm and self-hatred, the more I’ve wondered whether, if I’d been born 30 years later, I too might have tried to transition. The allure of escaping womanhood would have been huge. I struggled with severe OCD as a teenager. If I’d found community and sympathy online that I couldn’t find in my immediate environment, I believe I could have been persuaded to turn myself into the son my father had openly said he’d have preferred.

When I read about the theory of gender identity, I remember how mentally sexless I felt in youth. I remember Colette’s description of herself as a ‘mental hermaphrodite’ and Simone de Beauvoir’s words: ‘It is perfectly natural for the future woman to feel indignant at the limitations posed upon her by her sex. The real question is not why she should reject them: the problem is rather to understand why she accepts them.’

As I didn’t have a realistic possibility of becoming a man back in the 1980s, it had to be books and music that got me through both my mental health issues and the sexualised scrutiny and judgement that sets so many girls to war against their bodies in their teens. Fortunately for me, I found my own sense of otherness, and my ambivalence about being a woman, reflected in the work of female writers and musicians who reassured me that, in spite of everything a sexist world tries to throw at the female-bodied, it’s fine not to feel pink, frilly and compliant inside your own head; it’s OK to feel confused, dark, both sexual and non-sexual, unsure of what or who you are.

I want to be very clear here: I know transition will be a solution for some gender dysphoric people, although I’m also aware through extensive research that studies have consistently shown that between 60-90% of gender dysphoric teens will grow out of their dysphoria. Again and again I’ve been told to ‘just meet some trans people.’ I have: in addition to a few younger people, who were all adorable, I happen to know a self-described transsexual woman who’s older than I am and wonderful. Although she’s open about her past as a gay man, I’ve always found it hard to think of her as anything other than a woman, and I believe (and certainly hope) she’s completely happy to have transitioned. Being older, though, she went through a long and rigorous process of evaluation, psychotherapy and staged transformation. The current explosion of trans activism is urging a removal of almost all the robust systems through which candidates for sex reassignment were once required to pass. A man who intends to have no surgery and take no hormones may now secure himself a Gender Recognition Certificate and be a woman in the sight of the law. Many people aren’t aware of this.

We’re living through the most misogynistic period I’ve experienced. Back in the 80s, I imagined that my future daughters, should I have any, would have it far better than I ever did, but between the backlash against feminism and a porn-saturated online culture, I believe things have got significantly worse for girls. Never have I seen women denigrated and dehumanised to the extent they are now. From the leader of the free world’s long history of sexual assault accusations and his proud boast of ‘grabbing them by the pussy’, to the incel (‘involuntarily celibate’) movement that rages against women who won’t give them sex, to the trans activists who declare that TERFs need punching and re-educating, men across the political spectrum seem to agree: women are asking for trouble. Everywhere, women are being told to shut up and sit down, or else.

I’ve read all the arguments about femaleness not residing in the sexed body, and the assertions that biological women don’t have common experiences, and I find them, too, deeply misogynistic and regressive. It’s also clear that one of the objectives of denying the importance of sex is to erode what some seem to see as the cruelly segregationist idea of women having their own biological realities or – just as threatening – unifying realities that make them a cohesive political class. The hundreds of emails I’ve received in the last few days prove this erosion concerns many others just as much. It isn’t enough for women to be trans allies. Women must accept and admit that there is no material difference between trans women and themselves.

But, as many women have said before me, ‘woman’ is not a costume. ‘Woman’ is not an idea in a man’s head. ‘Woman’ is not a pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos or any of the other sexist ideas now somehow touted as progressive. Moreover, the ‘inclusive’ language that calls female people ‘menstruators’ and ‘people with vulvas’ strikes many women as dehumanising and demeaning. I understand why trans activists consider this language to be appropriate and kind, but for those of us who’ve had degrading slurs spat at us by violent men, it’s not neutral, it’s hostile and alienating.

Which brings me to the fifth reason I’m deeply concerned about the consequences of the current trans activism.

I’ve been in the public eye now for over twenty years and have never talked publicly about being a domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor. This isn’t because I’m ashamed those things happened to me, but because they’re traumatic to revisit and remember. I also feel protective of my daughter from my first marriage. I didn’t want to claim sole ownership of a story that belongs to her, too. However, a short while ago, I asked her how she’d feel if I were publicly honest about that part of my life, and she encouraged me to go ahead.

I’m mentioning these things now not in an attempt to garner sympathy, but out of solidarity with the huge numbers of women who have histories like mine, who’ve been slurred as bigots for having concerns around single-sex spaces.

I managed to escape my first violent marriage with some difficulty, but I’m now married to a truly good and principled man, safe and secure in ways I never in a million years expected to be. However, the scars left by violence and sexual assault don’t disappear, no matter how loved you are, and no matter how much money you’ve made. My perennial jumpiness is a family joke – and even I know it’s funny – but I pray my daughters never have the same reasons I do for hating sudden loud noises, or finding people behind me when I haven’t heard them approaching.

If you could come inside my head and understand what I feel when I read about a trans woman dying at the hands of a violent man, you’d find solidarity and kinship. I have a visceral sense of the terror in which those trans women will have spent their last seconds on earth, because I too have known moments of blind fear when I realised that the only thing keeping me alive was the shaky self-restraint of my attacker.

I believe the majority of trans-identified people not only pose zero threat to others, but are vulnerable for all the reasons I’ve outlined. Trans people need and deserve protection. Like women, they’re most likely to be killed by sexual partners. Trans women who work in the sex industry, particularly trans women of colour, are at particular risk. Like every other domestic abuse and sexual assault survivor I know, I feel nothing but empathy and solidarity with trans women who’ve been abused by men.

So I want trans women to be safe. At the same time, I do not want to make natal girls and women less safe. When you throw open the doors of bathrooms and changing rooms to any man who believes or feels he’s a woman – and, as I’ve said, gender confirmation certificates may now be granted without any need for surgery or hormones – then you open the door to any and all men who wish to come inside. That is the simple truth.

On Saturday morning, I read that the Scottish government is proceeding with its controversial gender recognition plans, which will in effect mean that all a man needs to ‘become a woman’ is to say he’s one. To use a very contemporary word, I was ‘triggered’. Ground down by the relentless attacks from trans activists on social media, when I was only there to give children feedback about pictures they’d drawn for my book under lockdown, I spent much of Saturday in a very dark place inside my head, as memories of a serious sexual assault I suffered in my twenties recurred on a loop. That assault happened at a time and in a space where I was vulnerable, and a man capitalised on an opportunity. I couldn’t shut out those memories and I was finding it hard to contain my anger and disappointment about the way I believe my government is playing fast and loose with womens and girls’ safety.

Late on Saturday evening, scrolling through children’s pictures before I went to bed, I forgot the first rule of Twitter – never, ever expect a nuanced conversation – and reacted to what I felt was degrading language about women. I spoke up about the importance of sex and have been paying the price ever since. I was transphobic, I was a cunt, a bitch, a TERF, I deserved cancelling, punching and death. You are Voldemort said one person, clearly feeling this was the only language I’d understand.

It would be so much easier to tweet the approved hashtags – because of course trans rights are human rights and of course trans lives matter – scoop up the woke cookies and bask in a virtue-signalling afterglow. There’s joy, relief and safety in conformity. As Simone de Beauvoir also wrote, “… without a doubt it is more comfortable to endure blind bondage than to work for one’s liberation; the dead, too, are better suited to the earth than the living.”

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

[zephyrthejester]

Steven Universe Future: A Predictive Wish List

The future is now. And by that, I mean that the debut of Steven Universe Future is at hand! A super special "limited series" (whatever that means) that will ultimately wrap up the greatest cartoon to grace television this decade. Indeed, all good things must come to an end. Regardless of what the Future holds, it is doubtless that I'll love and continue to love this show forever... So! Let's have a good ol' chat about what we want to see in the upcoming episodes!

I'm going to divide this wish list into two distinct sections, both of which should be self explanatory. Things that I "need," that my heart burns with desire for, and things that I "hope," that would be cool if it happens but it's no big deal if it doesn't.

This is going to be a loooooong post, so click Keep Reading to see it all!

What I NEED to Happen

Lars needs closure for his three ongoing story arcs. From Lars, I hope we see him expressing how much he and his life has changed, and how he's dealing with the return to tranquil life on Earth and his zombie status. Secondly, he and Sadie need to have a good, long chat. Their relationship was in turmoil at the time Lars got abducted by Aquamarine, and since then Sadie has redirected her life with a self-empowering attitude. There is a lot that remains unsaid between the two of them. Thirdly, Lars and Ronaldo were once childhood friends and had a feud as kids that lasted into their teens. I hope that gets touched upon, even if it's something as simple as the two apologizing to each other.

When it comes to Jasper... I don't want the show to handle her story in Future like a "redemption." Being redeemed is not what her character is about, and it's not what she needs. No, Jasper has lived her entire life clinging to an ideal and the perception of her strength. Both those things were ripped away from her. What Jasper needs is to learn acceptance of her reality, to embrace that even someone who is "flawless" can be fallible, and to become responsible for herself. The happiest ending for Jasper, I think, is not to become friends with the Crystal Gems or even to like Earth, but to accept herself.

On the subject of Jasper, the last thing I want are any positive interactions with Lapis Lazuli. In the best case scenario, the two won't interact at all. They were each other's mutual abusers and were both responsible for the most painful days of their lives. Some might say you need to confront the past to move beyond it, but Lapis already has and Jasper can learn to do the same. To cut someone toxic out of your life and move on without them should be celebrated. Could you imagine if Greg tried to reconnect with Marty? Yuck, right? That's how I feel about Lapis and Jasper.

Fusion Experiments and especially the Cluster need to be formally dealt with. While bubbles can keep them in stasis for eternity, Steven's not the sort of person to abandon those who suffer (unless you're a Ruby floating in space). The question is, how? Can he repair the shattered? Or will he give them the best lives they can get in their state? And how could the Cluster be removed from inside the Earth?

Speaking of those who remain in solitude... Pink Diamond's Zoo needs to be dealt with. There are dozens of Zoomans, a skeleton crew of Quartzes (including Holly Blue Agate, most likely) and most importantly of all, the entire Gem population of Rose Quartzes. REAL Rose Quartzes. We've never actually seen a real Rose Quartz, and it's high time we do. What do they sound like?! Dude, it’d be super funny if the real Rose Quartz voice sounds super distinct and Steven would wonder how Pink Diamond’s disguise fooled anyone.

We need an episode dedicated to Nephrite! She's technically been in the show longer than Lapis and Peridot, debuting in episode 01, and she's represented the entire Corrupted Gem plotline! We need to learn more about her! See her interact with people, including Steven! If not a whole episode for her, than at least some hearty screen time!

Spinel and the Diamonds need some screen time. It's a safe bet since they were all in the new intro, so to take a riskier request, I'm going to hope that the Diamonds come out and directly admit how horrible of monsters they've been. Their crimes are infinitely cruel, in both number and scale. And so far, the only thing they've done about it is to make an effort to... not commit more crimes against humanity. Err, Gemanity? Perhaps in their experience with a free Gempire they can actually get context for what they did, recognize the night-and-day difference between suffering and not-suffering, and get a little introspective about themselves.

Pink Pearl... Just, Pink Pearl. Like, hot dang, dude. If anything, make her the poster child of the above point about the Diamonds' crimes. Simply for wanting Pink Diamond to be happy, White overwrote Pink Pearl's individuality, even scarring her form, and kept her that way for thousands of years. How does Pink Pearl feel about that?! How will she deal with Pink Diamond being gone? What's next for her?

This last one tows the line between the two categories and might even be a bit selfish, but... I hope we see Mystery Girl again. I know Pearl's been "playing the field" since she met her, but it'd be cool to catch up with Pearl's relationship(s). It's not something we need to see, but just a quick line or two to reference it would be cool. Although, there is the unresolved hint that Mystery Girl might be Kevin's ex...

What I HOPE Will Happen

It'd be a crime not to introduce a fusion that involves Lapis, Peridot, and/or Bismuth. And, well... My take might surprise you. I'm hoping that Peridot will remain fusionless, because she is my oh-so-precious Ace representation. As for Lapis... I dunno. Is fusion something she desires? Could there possibly be a threat big enough to warrant fusing for combat purposes? It's hard to imagine either, though it would be sweet if fusion could become something more than Malachite for her. And that leaves Bismuth! To that I say, HELL YEAH! We heard tell of Bismuth once fusing with Garnet back in the Rebellion, and I can only dream how incredible that would be. Alternatively, maybe Bismuth and her best buddie in the whole world, Biggs, would make a good pair.

I want an episode that's a good ol' Space Adventure. Hopefully with Connie along for the ride! There's a massive galaxy out there ripe for exploring. The possibilities are endless! An episode of this nature would be a good excuse to see more of certain Gems such as Nephrite, Emerald, the Zircons, and maybe Lemon Jade.

It'd be cool to see some characters from the games, even if only as background easter eggs. I'm talkin' the Prism, Hessonite, Squaridot, those new garnets from the recently announced game I forget the name of (Unleash the Light?)...

At least one episode to meet and greet the Little Homeworld denizens, specifically Bismuth's big three (Biggs, Crazy Lace, and Snowflake). But especially Snowflake Obsidian. She looks super cool.

Finally, I'd like to see some light shed on the many, many unexplored mysteries. I'd be surprised if we got any of the following, but I can dream: What is the origin of Gem Species and/or The Diamonds? What is the deal with the Crystal Heart? What is the Geode? What's up with the space outside Warp tunnels? What's the latest on Watermelon Island? What are the rooms in the Temple like for most of the main cast Fusions, + Ruby and Sapphire's rooms? What has become of Pink Diamond's palanquin in Korea? Can Steven kiss up the Kindergartens to heal it like he did for Beach City in the movie? What's the deal with Rose's lion pride in the desert near her leg ship? And most importantly: WHAT WAS IN THE FREAKING CHEST?!?!?!?!?!?!?

WHAT WAS IN THE CHEST, SUGAR?!

...Okay. That’s it. That’s everything I want to say. Hmm. Looking back, I’m surprised how little Amethyst, Garnet, Connie, and Greg figure into my desires. I guess I’m totally complacent about their current status in the story.

So, I hope you’ll join me tomorrow when we take our first look at Steven Universe Future! Until then... Check out my analysis of the new Opening, if you haven’t already!

[blackestnight]

22: nightbloom

Prompt: Free day!

Word count: 1088

Follows up from Wayward Daughter, or: the missing brother. I cleansed my palate yesterday and am therefore back on my angsty bullshit.

(A stack of letters, the envelopes opened but the contents unread:)

Hanami,

Alisaie told us what happened in the Enclave. Don’t be mad at her, all right? We were all worried when you didn’t come back with her, and we made her tell us why you stayed. 

I’m not very good at the whole comforting thing. Or the whole mourning thing. Remember what a mess I was after Moen died? I just sat around and sulked for weeks. And that’s ignoring the whole...Yda thing. Not that there’s anything wrong with sulking! I’m not saying you have to come back and cry on my shoulder, or anything like that. 

I won’t lie and say I know exactly how you feel. I don’t, obviously. But I just want you to know, after Papalymo died and I had to take off Yda’s old mask, I pretty much spent a week in Shtola’s room crying my eyes out. The silly thing was, I wasn’t even crying over Papalymo, I was crying over Yda. And she’d been gone for more than a decade by then, did you know? But I’d been using her name for so long, it was like I hadn’t ever really taken the time to say goodbye to her.

Sorry, I’m talking about me too much. This is old news. I’m trying to channel my inner Thancred here--don’t tell him I said that!--and offer some tidy, bard-ly advice. 

Okay, here’s what I think I’ve been trying to say: grief doesn’t have any rhyme or reason, and it doesn’t stick to a nice schedule. Take your time, but remember it only gets better when you let it, yeah?

I really am sorry to hear about your brother. I just realized I hadn’t said so. I never met him, but if he was anything like you I bet he was amazing.

When you need us, Rhalgr’s Reach will always be open to you. We can get Naago to bring some of her mom’s cooking and talk, if you want. We can work on the whole mourning thing together.

Your friend, Lyse 

---

To my most esteemed friend,

Mistress Alisaie hath borne word of thine loss to us. While it is mine fear that it shall prove poor comfort, nevertheless I wish to offer mine condolences. 

As thou well knowest, I did not have the privilege to meet the late master Akinaga in person, and I dare not presume to speak for the dead, regardless. However, allow me to impart to thee my most fervent belief, that which hath guided me through the loss of both my beloved teacher and my closest friend: to give one’s life in service to one’s family, and to one’s nation, would be both the highest honor and the greatest of comforts. I pray, then, that thy kin finds rest in the Lifestream, knowing that he hath left such a legacy of heroic deeds. 

While doubtless Thancred shall include the sentiment in his own missive, it would be remiss of me not to say then upon thy return, we may gather to drink to the memory of those who hath marked the road before us, that we may follow blessed with clarity of purpose.

Ever thy humble servant,

Urianger Augurelt

---

My friend,

At the risk of sounding like the cookpot remarking on the kettle, let me start by saying that no matter what you might be thinking, you are not at fault. Such insidious thoughts are strong in the wake of loss, and I would hate for them to be your undoing as they were mine. Had you not journeyed to Eorzea when you had, the tragedy of Monzen may well have been repeated. 

The Scions’ greatest calling has always been to protect those who cannot protect themselves. Though it has come at a great cost, for all of us, remember that you have saved hundreds of innocent lives. From the sound of it, Akinaga did the same. As did Papalymo. As did Minfilia. In the coming days, try to be a person worthy of their gift, even when you feel like you can’t be.

Y’shtola asked me to transcribe a line for her, given her difficulty with a pen at the moment. As dictated:

The Lifestream is warm, and riding its current feels like falling asleep. Wherever he is now, he is there in comfort.

Poetic enough I did not feel tempted to editorialize, even.

When you come back, we’ll raise a glass to the future we’ve been entrusted.

Thancred

---

My most beloved daughter,

Word has reached us in Ishgard of your brother’s passing. I wish to begin by conveying my sorrow to you and your family, and my prayers for young master Akinaga’s peace in the life beyond ours. Though I know the Twelve hold little sway in your homeland, I hope that Halone will recognize the soul of a steadfast warrior, and guide him to his well-earned rest.

In times of loss such as these, perhaps the greatest comfort is to be surrounded by the love of family still living, and so it gladdens me to know that you have been reunited with your relatives. You have freed Ishgard and allowed us peace, and I hope that you will take this time to find comfort in the peace you have brought to Doma, as well. 

Though I will not make demands of your time, know that your home in Ishgard is here for you. Tonight House Fortemps will sit vigil for a knight who has answered the highest calling.

With deepest sympathies,

Edmont de Fortemps

---

I can imagine that a letter is the last thing you wish to deal with at the moment, so I will keep this brief, though I pray the sentiments within do not suffer for it.

I would come to you, if I could. I cannot, so I will instead promise to greet you with open arms when you come home, should you desire them. My home is yours, always, as are the scant comforts I can give. 

I love you. I am only ever a linkpearl away, should you desire my company, in one form or another, regardless of the hour or purpose.

Aymeric

---

(A crumpled note, stuffed into an envelope traditionally used for bereavement offerings, clearly repurposed, placed behind a grave marker:)

I’m sorry I called you a coward. I didn’t mean it. Forgive me. Even if I was too slow to apologize this time.

I’m leaving again. Please watch over them while I’m gone. 

Your dutiful sister. 

[homespork-review]

Spork Introduction

CHEL: Hi! I go by Chel, they or she pronouns, and I’m the one spearheading this project. I still like at least a fair percentage of Homestuck, but after the ending disappointed me a great deal, I got bitter, and when Hussie pissed me off further by Godwinning himself, I decided to do something about it. I’m no longer angry about it, but I felt I’d benefit from picking out what I hate from what I love so I can focus on the latter without annoyance getting in the way, and also to benefit my own writing efforts.

BRIGHT: Howdy! I’m Bright, and I got into Homestuck fairly recently. After ploughing through the archive and digesting for a while, I realised that I was thoroughly annoyed by how something enjoyable had fallen apart so comprehensively. I am looking forward to the time-honoured practice of ripping the story apart to identify its weak points and shout at them.

FAILURE ARTIST: Hello, I’m Failure Artist (call me FA for short), she/her/herself pronouns, and I’m so old-school they burned the school down. I was introduced to Homestuck via Something Awful’s Webcomic thread. I checked the old mspadventures.com site and the latest update was [S] John: Bite Apple. After watching that bizarre piece of animation, I had to know what the hell happened before then. I found I enjoyed the wit of the comic though I didn’t really care much about the plot. It was only when Act 5 came around that I became a serious fan. I currently have 122 Homestuck works on Archive of Our Own. I have a lot of free time, you see. I am very disappointed in how Homestuck ended. Possibly there was no completely satisfactory way it could end but it still could have been better. I feel like Hussie was a juggler who threw a lot of balls into the air and ignored them as they fell to the ground and some fans think not catching them was a master move since you’d expect he’d try to catch at least one. Sadly, lots of the problems with the ending are embedded deep within the canon.

TIER: Hi hi. I am Tier, a very late newcomer to the wonderful world of Homestuck (2018 reader!) and average fan overall. I love this webcomic to bits, but the low points are deep and I enjoy seeking out what the heck went wrong. Not particularly analytical myself, hope that's cool!

CHEL: Cool by us! We’ve already done plenty of analysing before we started, as you may realise from my Tumblr’s “homestuck ending hate” tag (at @chelonianmobile).

FAILURE ARTIST: But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the good stuff. 

Homestuck is incredibly innovative. It is the first true webcomic. It’s not just a print comic posted online. It uses not just still images and words but also animation, music, and interactive games.

Homestuck is the latest adventure in the series MS Paint Adventures. MS Paint Adventures started as a forum adventure. In forum adventures, the OP acts as a sort of Dungeon Master and other forum members give them prompts. Andrew Hussie’s previous works under MS Paint Adventures were Jailbreak (which is little more than Hussie dicking with the prompters in scatological ways), Bard’s Quest (Choose-your-own-adventure), and the actually-completed Problem Sleuth. Problem Sleuth lacks the music and animation and despite the weird physics shenanigans is a simpler story than Homestuck. The characters aren’t even two dimensional.

Homestuck (and the previous MS Paint Adventures minus Bard’s Quest) are set up like adventure games. Adventure games are where the player is a protagonist in a story and are usually focused on puzzle-solving though sometimes there’s combat. In the beginning, these games were purely text. The player would type what they wanted to do and the game would spout back text describing it - assuming the computer parser understood you.

CHEL: Oh god, I HATED that. I wasn’t around for the heyday but I’ve played a couple and

Pale Luna

was barely an exaggeration (horror warning).

FAILURE ARTIST: As graphics improved, adventure games started using them, but the commands were still in text. Only later was the point-and-click interface created and players didn’t have to guess what exact sentence the computer wanted them to type. Homestuck and the other MS Paint Adventures play with that frustration while paying tribute to the genre. The game within the comic uses RPG elements but the comic itself is set up like those good ol’ adventure games. In the beginning, Homestuck was guided by commands from forum members. Even after he closed the suggestion box, he used memes and fanon created by readers.

CHEL: How good an idea this was varies, as we’ll be showing.

We probably don’t need to describe Homestuck much more. Everyone here who hasn’t read it will doubtless have heard of it. Almost everyone with a Tumblr will have seen fanart, almost anyone at a convention will have seen cosplay. Shoutouts have been made to it in professional works such as the cartoon Steven Universe, and the Avengers fandom latched onto “caw caw motherfuckers” as a catchphrase for Hawkeye to the point that it’s now often forgotten it didn’t originate from there.

FAILURE ARTIST: The Homestuck fandom term “sadstuck” for depressing stories/headcanons somehow leaked into other fandoms. Using second-person is actually cool now and not just for awkward reader fics. Astrology will never be the same again.

CHEL: Now, in the interests of fairness, we will say that when Homestuck is good, it’s amazing, and it’s good often. The characters at least start out appealing and are all immediately distinguishable; even with the typing quirks stripped, it’s easy to tell who said what. The magic system is one of the coolest I’ve ever seen, who doesn’t love classpecting themselves and their faves? Hussie also shows a lot of talent for the complex meta and time travel weirdness, and it is fascinating to watch a timeline thread unfurl. And whatever else one says, it’s a fascinating story that’s captivated millions. I think it is deserving of its title as a modern classic.

However, as the years have passed, we have ended up noticing problems, big and small, and they nagged at us until we decided it had to be dissected. Our intention here isn’t to tear apart something we loathe entirely. It’s to take a complex work and pick out what works from what doesn’t. As I said, when Homestuck is good, it’s very very good. But when it’s bad, we get problems of every scale from various offensive comments to dragging pace to characters ignoring problems and solutions right under their noses to an absolute collapse of every theme and statement the comic stood for before.

The comic is ludicrously long; eight thousand pages, or thereabouts, to be specific. Officially one of the longest works of fiction in the English language, in fact. Naturally, we can’t riff that word by word in any timeframe short of decades, and we can’t include every picture, even if that was permitted under copyright law. Instead, as comics have been done here before, we’ll recap most of the time, and include sections of dialogue and pictures when particularly relevant to a point.

Here are the counts we’ll be using, possibly to be added to later if we find we forgot anything. Most of these counts will only start to climb post-Act 5, but we’ll be keeping track of them from the beginning. Most of them could have been fixed with a decent editor, which is sadly a hazard of webcomics, but still frustrating to read.

TIER: Note: we started this endeavor months before the thought of a "technically not but still we'll count it" set of canon epilogues were a twinkle in the eyes of the fandom. That is, by the way, a whole 'nother can of worms that will be dealt with at a later date if that ever comes around. We're judging Homestuck the Webcomic as a whole, so no after the credits stuff is to be noted for whatever reason.

ALL THE LUCK - Vriska Serket constantly gets a pass or gets favored over every other character. This count is added to every time she pulls some shenanigans with which others wouldn’t get away. ARE YOU TRYING TO BE FUNNY? - Sometimes it’s not entirely clear whether a thing is supposed to be taken seriously or not. We don’t require hand-holding through every joke, but when, for example, we’re supposed to take one instance of violence seriously while a similar case is supposed to be funny, this count goes up. CALL CPA PLEASE - Instances of creepy sexual behaviour (and perhaps particularly gratuitous acts of violence) from the thirteen-year-old cast. Now, mileage may vary on this one. We won’t pretend that thirteen-year-olds are perfect pure angels, especially thirteen-year-olds growing up in what is openly supposed to be a nightmarish dystopia. However, when full pages focus on said behaviour, there comes a point of it being very uncomfortable to read. Clarification: does not refer to cases where the adults do something heinous, this is strictly when the kids do. CLOCKWORK PROBLEMATYKKS - When an offensive joke or comment is made, particularly when not justified by the personality of the character involved, or presented in the narration as being okay. GET ON WITH IT! - When the pace drags. ‘Nuff said. Hazard of the format, but it makes archive bingeing very annoying. GORE GALORE - For unnecessary and/or excessive torture porn which is treated less seriously because it features troll characters, and therefore less “realistic” blood colours. HOW NOT TO WRITE A WEBCOMIC - When the comic does something mentioned in How Not To Write A Novel, and it isn’t justified by the webcomic format. HURRY UP AND DO NOTHING - Characters repeatedly neglect to do something about or even react to terrible happenings, either because they don’t care even if they should or they forget they have the capacity. Not necessarily anything to do with their magical powers, either - characters ignore personal problems that are right under their noses, too. IN HATE WITH MY CREATION - For reasons that are unclear, Hussie chose to create characters he apparently hated writing, or at least ignored in favour of others. Every time he’s clearly disrespecting one of his own characters, this goes up, whether it’s by nerfing their powers or changing their personalities. RELATIONSHIP GOALS? - Romantic relationships in particular get fumbled quite often. Ship Teasing is used with skill, but that skill tends to be lost when the characters actually hook up. Fumbled friendships and family relations can also come under this heading. SEND THEM TO THE SLAMMER - When characters other than Vriska get away with something morally questionable. Covers everything from sexual harassment to not trying to save people from the apocalypse. SOME OF MY BEST FRIENDS - Later on in Homestuck’s run, Hussie tried to make up for the offensive humour and casual -isms counted by Clockwork Problematykks above. How successful he was at this varied. This count goes up whenever an attempt at progressivism is waved in front of the reader but doesn’t stand up under scrutiny. WHAT IS HAPPENING?? - When the already confusing plot kicks it up a notch. Admittedly this is as much a selling point of the comic as it is an issue, but either way, we’re going to keep track. Points will be added to when it gets confusing, and taken away when a previous confusing thing is explained adequately. WHITE SBURB POSTMODERNISM - What is shown about Alternia repeatedly contradicts what we’re told about how different it is from Earth. For example, trolls still use heteronormative terms even after it’s established they reproduce bisexually, and the demonstration of the class structure doesn’t always add up. This count goes up every time that happens. It also goes up every time something happens which strongly implies Hussie was envisioning the human kids as white, despite his later claims that they were always supposed to be “aracial”, and every time their economic statuses don’t add up either.

[writesandramblings]

The Captain’s Secret - p.73

“Where Once Was Light”

A/N: Covers the remainder of episode 9, "Into the Forest I Go." Sorry for the delay, I wrote the chapter one way, then decided to scrap it and do it over. And then went for a third go to restore some of the content I regretting losing from the first revision! Also, it took a long time to figure out the exact code Lorca keyed into the console, but I think I got it right in the end.

Cornwell fans: I know this is probably a rocky road for you since "The Stars, Broken," but I promise you, you're going to get what you need by the time this journey is over.

Full Chapter List Part 1 - Objects in Motion << 72 - All the Fears You Hold So Dear 74 - Now Darkness Falls >>

On the surface it seemed like there was no way out, but command politics, like space battles, were largely a question of advantageous positioning. Lorca was too good a strategist to accept a no-win scenario on any front. Not when he had so many other victories to fall back on.

In the past day alone, he had destroyed the Sarcophagus, protected Pahvo, and inadvertently rescued Cornwell. There were doubtless captains out there who would rather see Lorca leading the fleet then Terral. Coupled with his unparalleled ability to utilize the spore drive, removing him from Discovery at this critical junction could only be seen as tactical folly. The remaining admiralty had to recognize that.

Problem was, as the number of admirals shrank, Cornwell's voice became louder and louder. Never mind that she and Terral were demonstrably buffoons when it came to military strategy. She might get her way if she poured honey in enough ears.

He had to neutralize Cornwell. She had been tortured by Klingons for weeks. He could make the case she was not in her right mind and had conflated or misremembered events as a result. There was O'Malley's report to consider, but it was entirely nonspecific. What if he convinced Lalana or Mischkelovitz to claim the report was about one of them? He could doubly frame Cornwell as a jealous ex-lover with an axe to grind. O'Malley might be a hard sell, but supposing Mischkelovitz were game, the colonel could be pressured into compliance. He would do anything for his sister.

Cornwell had tried to come after his command. It would be interesting to see if her career could survive the accusations Lorca was prepared to level at her.

The comm sounded. "Culber to Lorca. You asked to be informed when Lieutenant Stamets was clear to return to duty."

There was a cold formality to Culber's words. "Thank you, doctor."

"Captain, I'm going to say something, and I need you to listen to me and hear what I'm telling you." Culber waited for acknowledgment, half expecting Lorca to close the channel.

"I'm listening."

"Paul could have died." As formal as the initial contact had been, it was now clearly entirely personal. "I warned you it was too dangerous."

"He didn't," said Lorca. Stamets had been exhausted by the ordeal, but the exhaustion passed, and he was now back to normal, or whatever passed for normal nowadays. "Dr. Mischkelovitz said he'd be fine and he is."

Culber exploded, but quickly pulled himself back to a more measured tone, aware he had to curtail his emotions the given the current audience. "He isn't fine, captain! We are talking about cumulative neurological damage."

Damage so unremarkable, Culber had not noticed it for weeks despite living with Stamets. That implied something a little different to Lorca. "Changes," said Lorca. "We're talking about neurological changes, the extent of which, by your own—"

That Lorca would downplay the significance of this made Culber want to throw out the Hippocratic Oath and sock Lorca in the jaw. It was probably a good thing they were speaking over the comms. "Captain! When we reach Starbase 46, I intend to lodge a formal complaint."

Lorca was still holding the cookie in his hand from the end of his conversational with Terral. His fingers tightened, cracking it unintentionally. He dropped the broken pieces onto the desk. "If you want to do so, that's your right, but let me make something clear, doctor. I didn't order Lieutenant Stamets into that spore drive. I merely asked. He got in there to save the aliens down on that planet because your husband is the sort of man who would do anything to stop an injustice against an innocent species." Stamets had proven as much when he subjected himself to a lateral genetic transfer rather than let Ripper suffer one more jump as the spore drive's biocomputer. "For what it's worth, I'm proud of him. There aren't many people would make that choice and risk themselves to save a planet of strangers. All I did was provide the opportunity for him to show exactly what kind of man he is. That's all I've ever asked from my crew: for them to be exactly who they are."

The sentiment left Culber stunned. That Lorca had said or thought any part of it did not remove the fact Stamets' brain was fundamentally changed in ways none of them fully understand, but it certainly gave Culber pause on his stated course of action.

Lorca continued, "Now I understand you're upset because you love him, so if you want to blame me, fine, but I won't stand in the way of Stamets being who he is. I have to believe that's part of why you married him."

Lorca listened to the dead air on the other end of the line with some degree of satisfaction. To underscore the assertion being made about who was in the right and who was wrong here, he added, "I appreciate the heads up on your complaint. If there's nothing else?"

"I want to go on record and state it is my medical recommendation that Lieutenant Stamets not conduct any further jumps with the spore drive," said Culber firmly, back to full professionalism. "To do so would be an undue risk to his health. We need to make do without the drive until after Paul has been cleared by Starfleet Medical."

"Duly noted. Lorca out." Lorca looked down at the crumble of cookie pieces on his desk and extracted the fortune from the mess. Your future is as boundless as the lofty heaven.

So long as he had the spore drive, the universe, like this little slip of paper, sat in the palm of his hand. All he had to do was make sure the spore drive, despite Culber's medical advice, still remained in play. Besides, if anyone was a hero in what they had just done, it was Paul Stamets.

He drafted up a communique and directed it to Admiral Terral.

Decline Legion of Honor. Give Lt. Paul Stamets, instrumental in Discovery success. The message was practically in pidgin. Lorca was going to take back all that power over Terral, Cornwell or no, and an intentionally terse, bordering on grammatically unsound missive was a step in the right direction.

Aware the clock was running, Lorca went to Lab 26. O'Malley was on the door. He offered Lorca only a cursory grimace and "captain" in greeting; they were both too overly conscious of and disappointed in O'Malley's recent ineffectuality to be in any mood to speak to one another.

Mischkelovitz, on the other hand, was excited to see Lorca, immediately dimming the lights and conjuring up the map. "It's done! What do you think?"

"It's incredible," said Lorca, reaching up to touch the holographic display as if to make sure it was real.

"Shakespearean," said a voice, and Lorca jerked his hand back in surprise. Lalana was standing in the doorway to her room. He could see the map reflected in her eyes as she stepped forward.

Lorca closed the map. "Sorry. Classified."

"Really? I believe my clearance is as high as yours." A kind lie; in actuality, because of the intelligence work she had done over the past decade, hers was technically higher.

"Eyes only," he clarified.

Lalana came right up to the workbench, grabbing the edge of the table to steady herself in a standing position. "Will you not make an exception for these eyes? I have already seen it, after all, and who would I tell? The two people I know best are in this room."

Stamets had seen the map, too, though not in its completed form. "All right." Lorca brought the display back up. "It's a map might take us to other universes."

"Definitely," said Mischkelovitz.

Lalana could not interact with holographic displays correctly so she relied upon Mischkelovitz to manipulate the map for her. Mischkelovitz deftly displayed the map's features: the locations of previous jumps, the color-coded navigable routes, the lines that curved away into another universe, or perhaps infinite universes.

"Truly it is amazing," said Lalana, "though are there not enough stars in this universe for you to explore? Must you also have another?"

"Who knows," said Lorca. "Maybe there's a universe out there where I'm an emperor, and Mischkelovitz is Einstein, Hawking, and Curie combined."

"Or at least a universe where everybody doesn't think I'm a monster," said Mischkelovitz bitterly.

Lorca's expression softened and he looked at Mischkelovitz with something approaching pity. "Maybe. Assuming you can find a way to implement these coordinates."

"There's nothing to implement. I don't know if our spore drive can get us there, but technically it's the same coordinate set," said Mischkelovitz.

"Oh? Then, there's nothing stopping us?"

"I wouldn't say that exactly... It isn't as easy as just jumping within the reference frame of a single universe."

"Is it dependent on particle resonance?" asked Lalana.

Mischkelovitz looked at Lalana with a confused expression, not because the question made no sense, but because it made too much sense. "The coordinates are farther away in a nonlinear dimension so it would take a lot more processing power than we have to reach them," she explained, then started to think aloud, "though, particle resonance could be used as a targeting component, and explain how multiple realities can exist in layered instances of spacetime connecting to the mycelial plane as a singular, unified frame of reference."

"Can the box do it?" asked Lorca. The lului box, ostensibly the focus of Mischkelovitz's current non-map research.

Again, Mischkelovitz looked at Lalana, this time with a faint expression of panic.

"We have good and bad news about that!" Lalana announced. "The good news is, the box is operational. The bad news is, the internal battery is still charging. We cannot confirm it will be effective until it is charged."

"Then let's get it charged."

"It is charging itself already! It uses an exotic and rare particle, so it will take some time."

"How long?"

"Twelve years."

Lorca stared. "What?"

"That is not very long to a lului," pointed out Lalana.

It was not, but it was entirely too long for them. "Then can we find some more particles?"

"Alas, the particles only exist in subspace, and we have no way of extracting them."

"The technology to do so is only theoretical at present," offered Mischkelovitz, sounding as uncertain as anyone could be. "Maybe in a few years I can have a prototype extractor designed."

Lorca leaned against the worktable. "One step at a time," he sighed. "Speaking of, I have a favor to ask. Two, if you'd be so kind."

"Is one of them sex?" asked Mischkelovitz.

Lorca realized he had inadvertently created a new kind of monster. Was this going to happen every time he encountered Mischkelovitz from now on? Part of him wished he had stuck to cookies. Her social ineptitude was only fun when it was at the expense of someone else's time and sanity. "No, but hear me out, and nothing's off the table."

"Nothing?" asked Lalana, perking up.

"Enough!" said Lorca sharply, and made his first request.

Mischkelovitz turned out to be entirely amenable to playing a role in Lorca's ploy, sympathetic as she was to the plight of requiring special sleeping accommodations. Her acceptance was compounded by Lorca's seemingly offhand but entirely calculated use of the words, "Consider it pulling one over on the adults back at Starfleet Command." O'Malley would be furious when he found out, but Lorca could handle him easily enough. The colonel had essentially served up his loyalties on a platter with that QORYA story.

The second request turned out to be the harder sell. "Now, I don't mean to alarm you, but we have Klingons headed our way from almost every direction. Normally, it'd be a three-hour trip by warp to Starbase 46, but we can't take a route that direct, not with the Klingons between us and there, which means we gotta take a route a little more scenic. This increases the likelihood we run into more Klingons, or that they try and head us off."

"Then let's jump," said Mischkelovitz.

"Unfortunately, Dr. Culber has advised no more jumps."

Mischkelovitz stared. "But why?"

"That jump sequence took a lot outta Stamets and Culber doesn't trust the changes in his brain. You might say he's been spooked. Unfortunately, without a safe jump to un-spook him, it looks like we're taking the long way. Unless..." Lorca's eyebrows raised and he looked at Mischkelovitz with an expectant smile. "Perhaps you could convince Dr. Culber?"

The confusion on Mischkelovitz's face deepened. "Me?"

"You're friends now, right? All I need you to do is go and cry some of those beautiful tears at him, let him see how upset you'll be if we don't make it to our destination in one piece. We are beset on all sides, Mischka. It'd be a damn shame if that cloaking algorithm you and Saru worked so hard on never saw the light of day. An even bigger shame if we all got blown to smithereens."

Lalana watched them both with rapt attention. Her hands were still gripping the edge of the table, or else they would have been spinning with delight. She had missed watching Lorca at work firsthand. It was her favorite thing to watch in all the universe.

"You won't let us get blown up," said Mischkelovitz, with the fervent loyalty of the child she so frequently expressed herself to be.

"We've been lucky so far," said Lorca, reaching his hand up and cupping Mischkelovitz's cheek. "Luck can run out. Do you want to risk it when we have a safe way to travel right here, if only Dr. Culber can be convinced to let us use it?"

"I don't think I can cry on command," said Mischkelovitz.

The one thing she could be counted on to do and she doubted it. "Want to know a secret? All you have to do is find the thing that's true in what you're saying."

"It is true," said Lalana, "that it would be a terrible shame if we all ended up like Milosz did back at the Battle of the Binary Stars. Myself, Gabriel, John, and Macarius. Can you picture it? All of us, dead or dying, right in front of you."

Tears began to well in Mischkelovitz's eyes. Lorca smiled. "That's my girl," he said, patting her cheek. "Now run along and don't let your brother see those tears."

Mischkelovitz nodded, wiped at her eyes, took a deep breath to steady herself, and fled.

"Don’t forget about the algorithm," Lorca called after her as the inner doors closed. He leaned against the worktable and fixed Lalana with a wry frown. "Really, Lalana? Milosz? I don't know if you needed to go that far."

"It helped you attain the desired result, did it not?"

"Still. That was overkill." Probably invoking O'Malley would have been enough.

"Better overkill than half-measures," said Lalana cheerily.

Lorca smirked at her. He loved it when she expressed herself in pithy platitudes. "We should put that in a fortune cookie."

"The important thing is we get you in front of someone who better understands this," said Culber, giving Stamets' shoulder a squeeze. They were in sickbay still, going over Stamets' scans.

"I didn't realize it was this bad," said Stamets. "I feel..." He shrugged. Fine wasn't the right word, but he also didn't feel bad. Different worked, but even he was not sure what it meant in this context.

"I know how important your work is to you," said Culber, the beginning of a consolation he felt Stamets needed.

"Forget that," said Stamets. "You're more important. I'm sorry I kept it from you, I just..."

Culber slid his arm across Stamets' back, pulling Stamets in and leaning his head against Stamets' shoulder. "The important thing is we're going to get through this together."

The doors slid open and Mischkelovitz came skidding in and rushed over to them, oblivious to the fact she was interrupting a private conversation. "Hugh!" she exclaimed at Culber with wide-eyed fear. Then her eyes shifted to Stamets and her expression became a disturbing scowl. "And... person."

"Paul," Stamets scowled back at her. He had not forgotten their altercation over the spores. "But to you, it's Lieutenant Stamets."

Culber was well aware of that altercation. As much as he had tried to explain to Stamets that Mischkelovitz required a little more patience than most, it seemed she and Stamets were intent on picking back up right where they had left off.

But then Mischkelovitz stopped herself, stared down at the floor, and her jaw began to tremble. She squeezed her eyes shut and started silently crying.

"Dr. Mischkelovitz?"

"I don't want everyone I love to die!" she wept, balling her hands into fists and pressing them to her face.

Culber and Stamets exchanged a look. All of Stamets' ire had vanished, replaced by a concern matching Culber's. "Why would you say that?" asked Stamets.

"That's not going to happen," promised Culber.

Mischkelovitz let out a plaintive wail. "But there's Klingons everywhere! We'll never make it! And I don't—I don't want to watch him die, too!"

Another look passed between Stamets and Culber. The question, unvoiced, was plain to both of them: was she crying about Lorca? (She was not, of course, but neither of them had any cause to know any better.)

"They know we killed the Ship of the Dead! They're coming for us! And they'll get us, they'll get us!" She directed this last bit at Stamets.

Culber gently put a hand on Stamets shoulder. "I'll take care of this," he said.

"Hold on," said Stamets. He hunched down slightly, craning his neck so he was level with Mischkelovitz's downturned face. "We won't let that happen. Will we, Hugh?"

For a moment, Culber thought it was an empty consolation, but then he realized what Stamets meant. The color drained from Culber's face but he plastered on a smile. "That's right, we won't. Everything's gonna be fine... Mischka. One jump." His eyes were unsteady as he locked his gaze with Stamets.

"One jump," said Stamets.

Lorca found Stamets in the shuttle bay staring out at the view of the planet Pahvo and its lovely reddish-hued star through the bay's forcefield. "They wanted to give me a medal," Lorca said as he took up a position next to Stamets. "For... leading the mission, saving Pahvo. If you can believe the irony." He looked at Stamets, unable to contain the smile on his face. Lorca still preferred stars to planets, but Pahvo was not just any planet, it was a planet that continued to exist because they had saved it.

In a sense, saving Pahvo had also saved Starfleet because saving Pahvo meant upholding the virtues upon which Starfleet and the Federation were founded. Virtues Admiral Terral had been willing to throw away. Virtues which were also something Stamets and Lorca now realized they had in common: that spirit of exploration, that desire to display the sort of upstanding character that compelled you to rush to the defense of the weak. Uniting disparate skills and species into a whole that was universes better than the sum of its parts.

The smile on Lorca's face held a genuine paternal affection. "I told them to give it to you."

"That's, um..." Stamets blinked. "Not necessary, sir."

"You made the jumps, you risked everything. None of it would have been possible without you. You did so well, the Klingons are on their way, hell-bent on revenge. I wish we could stay and fight, but Starfleet wants us back at Starbase 46."

"Do you need me to jump?"

"No," said Lorca, shaking his head, "I would never ask that of you. You've done enough. We'll warp to Starbase 46. We'll be fine."

"But—the Klingons—" Stamets seemed almost to stammer a moment. "I'll do one more jump to get the crew back to safety. They've risked enough already."

"If you're sure," said Lorca, and Stamets nodded. "Thank you." He looked back out at Pahvo then. "We're gonna win this war on account of you, Mr. Stamets. After this, it's a whole new chapter for Discovery. You've opened a door to a whole new era of exploration. The data provided by the micro-jumps will push us closer than we've ever been before to understanding the mysteries of the universe—"

"No, captain," said Stamets. "I mean only one more jump. After we get back, I'm done."

Lorca stared. This was not happening. He had thought Culber to be the sole barrier to their continued use of the spore drive, that Stamets' passion for his work outweighed everything else in his life, the way Lorca's thirst for the stars did. He realized mushrooms were not the thing Stamets loved most. He had misjudged the astromycologist.

Stamets mistook Lorca's look for a personal judgment and tried to explain himself. "Traveling the mycelial network is like comingling the most abstruse blips of our celestial existence. I've seen these stars through a lens no one else has access to, and that has to be enough for me. Because I need Starfleet's best doctors to examine my condition and figure out what's been happening to me."

There was tremendous fear in Stamets' expression. The idea that something was happening to him outside of his control was terrifying.

First Landry, then Ripper, now Stamets. Lorca's monsters were vanishing one by one.

Of course, Stamets was more than a monster. He had been a human first. He seemed to desire to return to this state now. Lorca turned to Stamets, smiled. "One last jump, then. You have served the Federation honorably, lieutenant."

"Well, I'll always have you to thank for the view."

"Hm!" went Lorca, surprised by the sentiment. "You ready?"

As they walked towards the shuttle bay doors, Lorca kept his face as level as possible. Stamets was a crucial part of what made Discovery so important and what made Lorca himself so effective. If Stamets was gone, he would be without the leverage he needed to stave off the forces seeking to strip him of his command.

One jump. He was only going to get one more jump. Everything depending on what was on the other end of that jump. If they docked at that starbase, Stamets would walk away potentially forever, Terral and Cornwell would take Discovery, and Lorca did not know where his place was in this universe without the ship.

No, he realized, without Discovery, he had no place here at all. He knew it as surely as he knew the stars were shining and space was largely empty and black.

They reached the junction where Stamets went right and Lorca left. Lorca extended his hand. "See you on the other side."

Stamets shook Lorca's hand and smiled. So many times in the past they had been momentarily on the same page and then slipped right off and ended up odds with one another. Stamets was gratified to think they were ending this journey on the same page at last. "Thank you again, captain."

"No, thank you," said Lorca, and Stamets could tell Lorca meant it.

As they headed their separate ways, Stamets suddenly paused, turned back, and said, "Captain? I know it's not really my place, but... Dr. Mischkelovitz came into sickbay crying? Maybe you should, I dunno, check on her?"

"I will," said Lorca.

He had to act fast. The timer was still running and it was fast approaching zero hour. Absent time, he needed more space. Mischkelovitz was still in sickbay, sharing a cup of hot tea with Culber, apparently calm enough for a regular conversation now. She and Culber were even laughing, though Lorca immediately noticed her laughter was an attempt at polite reinforcement and not at all genuine.

All he had do was say her name and beckon to her and she put down her tea and trotted after him obediently.

"I cried," she said when they were in the hall, as if the red, puffy state of her eyes were not proof enough.

"We have a problem," said Lorca, glancing to make sure the corridor was deserted. "I just received word from Terral. Now that the cloak is solved, they don’t need you on Discovery, so they're gonna send you back to some laboratory behind the lines and make you work on someone else's projects. Unless we can give them a reason to keep you here."

Mischkelovitz's eyes went wide. Leave Discovery? Discovery was her home. There was no captain that would have her but Lorca, and for reasons that went deeper than anything Lorca could ever know, she did not want to be anywhere but on a starship.

"We need to give them proof that your map is real." Lorca swallowed. Everything depended on how she took this next piece of information. "Particular resonance targeting," he said in a way that made it feel like he had spoken those exact words before. He removed something from his pocket. It was shiny and gold. "Can you get me the resonance coordinates for this?"

It was an insignia, but not one she recognized. At its center lay a circle of red and black patterned to resemble the continents of a planet. A sword stabbed through the planet, and two smooth, wing-like protrusions reminded her of the Starfleet insignia turned upside-down.

He let her take it, his fingers shaking faintly as she did, because he had not let anyone else touch it, much less see it, in two years. She turned it over and gasped at the inscription on the back.

"It's proof, Mischka," he said. "At least, I think it is. That's why I had to get Burnham. To make sure."

The letters on the back were as plain as day: BURNHAM. MICHAEL. A service number which was not Starfleet in origin.

"The thing is, they'll never believe me unless we can show them, without any doubt, that you're right, and I'm right. Even with this algorithm, we are still outnumbered and outgunned against the Klingons, but maybe we can fix that if we can find more guns and more people. So tell me, right now, can you provide me with the origin of wherever this came from?"

"I need a few days, but... yes."

Lorca's face fell. This was not a time problem that could be solved with one hundred and thirty-three jumps, not when he only had the one. He would have to take Discovery on the universe's most insane "evasive maneuvers" to buy her that much time. That was not likely to fool anyone for very long.

Finding Lorca absent any elation, Mischkelovitz asked, "You need it sooner?"

"I need it now," he admitted.

"Then let's go," she said, and started off the hallway, taking the lead for once.

"Put it in your pocket," Lorca told her, falling into step beside her.

O'Malley noticed her puffy eyes on her return, of course, and started to try and engage her, but Mischkelovitz held up a hand. "Wait here," she said to them both, and stepped into the lab.

The door closed. They waited.

Forty seconds later, Mischkelovitz emerged again, strangely very calm. "Okay," she said to Lorca. "You can come in now."

The insignia was on the worktable. The mycelial map floated above, but it looked different now. There were two maps overlaid on one another, half a centimeter apart. There was no sign of Lalana, thank goodness. Lorca picked up the mysterious insignia and slid it into his pocket as he stared at the map.

"You're a miracle worker," he told Mischkelovitz.

"No," she said, "I'm a hard worker and a smart worker. Miracles are for fools."

However she wanted to describe it, it was a miracle. He reached up and encrypted the second map under a personal command code, FKECG.

"This probably goes without saying, but not a word of this to anyone. Promise me. This stays between us and the higher-ups at Starfleet Command when we brief them, all right?"

"Yes, captain."

Honestly, she had her own reasons for not wanting anyone to know what she had just done.

"Captain, there was a strange data surge from Lab 26," said Saru when Lorca stepped onto the bridge. Lorca wondered exactly how much processing power Mischkelovitz had siphoned from the ship's data centers to get the results as fast as she had.

"We'll look into it after we arrive safe and sound," said Lorca, and went to the captain's chair.

In the engineering lab, Culber looked at the spore drive chamber, features clouded with worry. He heard footsteps and turned. Stamets strode straight up to Culber, cupped his hands against Culber's face and kissed him with a fervent passion. It was a kiss that lingered and broke only when Lorca's voice came over the comms.

"Mr. Stamets? Shall we dock this weary vessel?"

"Yes, Captain," said Stamets, gazing at Culber with adoration. He could see Culber's reluctance, the fear. "There is a moon near Starbase 46 and I understand they have the most esteemed Kasseelian opera house where they are currently performing La bohème. I could be your date."

Stamets had always hated opera, but he loved Culber so much more. His love for Culber was the single greatest force in his version of the universe. Culber's face broke into a smile. "Are you saying you'll actually sit through that with me?"

"Just this jump," said Stamets earnestly, "and then I'm going to have a lot of free time on my hands."

Culber reached up, drew his hand across Stamets' cheek, and then let Stamets go. Stamets entered the spore chamber, smiling. At the drive controls, Tilly initiated the spore release.

Up on the bridge, Lorca looked at the viewscreen at the stars. If he did this, there was no going back from it, but then, there was no going back now anyway. Lorca brought up the encrypted command override of the navigational controls on the console in the armrest of his chair. His fingers danced across the keypad. F-K-E-C-G.

"Let's go home," he said.

The spores swirled about the spore chamber, a cloud of pale blue dust, and still Stamets was smiling at Culber.

Then he screamed. Everything on the ship began to flash as the power systems fluctuated far beyond the capacity of the regulators to compensate. The ship shuddered. The force of it drove Culber back against Tilly's console on the opposite side of the room from Stamets. Crystals of ice formed on the surface of the spore chamber.

A moment later, all was still. The lights returned.

"Talk to me, cadet," said Lorca.

Tilly's voice was a panic. "The computer is reading it as an incomplete navigational sequence!"

Stamets staggered out of the spore drive and collapsed onto the floor. Culber and Tilly rushed to his side. Culber rolled Stamets over. Stamets convulsed, his eyes closed.

"He's crashing," said Culber, voice small and desperate. "I'm detecting white matter hyperintensity." Stamets' eyes popped open. They were suddenly pale, the blue obscured behind a cloud of milky white.

"What's wrong with him?" asked Tilly. As Culber's voice had shrunk, hers had risen in panicked alarm. "What's happening to his eyes?"

Stamets spoke. "So many... I can see them all! Infinite permutations. It's... magnificent!" His eyes twitched back and forth.

"Paul? Paul?" Culber called out, but Stamets did not respond.

Part 74

[ciathyzareposts]

The Shareware Scene, Part 1: The Pioneers

The digital society which we’ve created over the last few decades has upended many of our traditional notions about commerce. Everyday teenagers now stress over their ratings and advertising revenues on YouTube; gamers in “free” games pay staggering sums for the privilege of advancing through them a little faster (wasn’t the actual playing supposed to be the point of a game?); “clicks” and “likes” have become commodities that are traded in the same way that soybean futures are in the “real” world; consumers have become speculators in their own future entertainment on crowd-funding platforms like Kickstarter; a writer like me can ask for support from readers like you to allow me to make content that I then give away for free. (Thank you for that!) And, in the most direct parallel to our main topic for today, even some of the biggest corporations on the planet have learned to give away their products for free, then ask us to pay for them later.

Some of these new modes of commerce reflect the best in us, some perhaps the very worst. They all share in common, however, the quality of being markedly different from the old model wherein you paid someone an upfront amount of money and got some concrete good or service in exchange. As those of you with elderly parents or grandparents may well have learned, our modern digital economies have departed so far from that model in some areas that just explaining how they work to someone still wedded to the old ways can be a daunting task indeed. (I know that my 86-year-old father has literally no idea what I do all day or how I can possibly be earning money from it…) Maybe we too should ask the question that so many of our elders are already asking themselves every day: exactly how did we get from there to here so quickly?

It’s a bigger question than any one article can possibly answer. Still, it does turn out that we can trace at least one point of origin of our strange new ways of commerce to a trio of American pioneers who, all within a year of one another, embraced a new model for selling software — a model which has, one might say, taken over the world.

Andrew Fluegelman

The first of our pioneers is one Andrew Fluegelman. Born in 1943, Fluegelman within his first 35 years of life finished law school, passed the Bar exam, took up and then gave up corporate law, and settled into a whole new career as the owner, editor, and sole employee of the Headlands Press, a boutique book publisher in Marin County, California. He worked from time to time with the techno-utopian visionary Stewart Brand on The Whole Earth Catalog, and even the books he edited and published on his own had much the same counter-cultural DIY flavor: The New Games Book (a selection of friendly outdoor sporting activities for groups of adults), How to Make and Sell Your Own Record, Worksteads: Living and Working in the Same Place. Yet for all their hippie bona fides, Headlands books went out under the larger imprint of the international publishing titan Doubleday. The ability to speak the language of both the idealistic dreamer and the everyday businessperson proved a vital asset for Fluegelman throughout his life.

Like Brand and so many others of a similar bent, Fluegelman saw great potential in the personal computer as a force for social liberation. Therefore in 1981, before ever actually purchasing a computer of his own, he signed a contract with Doubleday to embark on a new book project, this time with himself in the role of coauthor rather than just editor. It was to be an exploration of the role of computers in the writing process, in terms of both current practicalities and future potential. He would of course need to buy himself a computer to complete the project. Just as he was about to pull the trigger on an Apple II, the IBM PC was announced. “I took one look at it and just had this gut feeling,” he said in a later interview. “This is what I want.”

While he waited for the machine he had ordered to arrive, Fluegelman, who had never touched a computer before in his life, started teaching himself BASIC from books. Even after the computer came in, learning to word-process on it remained on the back burner for a time while he continued to pursue his new passion for programming. His bible was that touchstone of a generation of amateur programmers, David Ahl’s million-selling book BASIC Computer Games. Fluegelman:

I got Ahl’s [book], and I said, “This is just what I want to do.” I typed [one of the games] in. It took me a day to get the bugs out and get the thing to run. And as soon as I saw the program running, I immediately started thinking, “Well, gee, I’d really like to add up the scores, and say this, and make a little noise…” I’d look through the book, and I’d say, “Oh, there’s something I could use. What happens if I stick it in there?”

I’m a real believer in the Berlitz method of programming. Which is: you learn how to say, “Please pass the salt,” [then] you look in the dictionary and look up the word for “pepper,” stick it in there, and, by God, someone gives you the pepper. And you know you’re making progress. Purely trial and error.

I liked it a lot. I abandoned all bodily functions for about a month.

Programmers are born as much as made. You either feel the intrinsic joy of making a machine carry out your carefully stipulated will or you don’t; the rest is just details. Clearly Fluegelman felt the joy.

Still, the book project wouldn’t wait forever. Fluegelman and Jeremy Joan Hewes, his coauthor, had the idea that they would indeed write the book together, but with each working on his own machine from his own office. They would share their files electronically; it would be one more way of practicing what they intended to preach in the book proper, about the new methods of working that were unlocked by the computer. But Hewes had an older CP/M computer rather than a flashy new IBM PC, and this stopped them in their tracks — for the only telecommunications package currently available for the latter came from IBM themselves, and could only swap files using IBM’s proprietary protocols. Fluegelman thus found himself in the ironic position of being able to trade files with an IBM mainframe, but not with most of his peers in the world of personal computing. He could see only one solution:

[I] started out to write a communications program. I said, “Gee, I’d really like to do this, and I’d like to do that, and we should have a dialing directory, and we should have some macros…” And I just kept adding to it for my own use.

We eventually typeset the book using the program I wrote. In the process, I gave it to a lot of my friends, and they started using it. At the time it was the only program that let you do these things on the IBM PC; this was the early spring of 1982. And inevitably one of my friends said, “You know, you really ought to publish that.”

If I hadn’t been in the publishing business for eight years, I would have gone the traditional route — find a publisher, royalties — but I’d been through all that, and I’d seen the pitfalls and all the ways things can get derailed. And this was kind of a new medium, and I was still very exhilarated by it. And I said, having had all this fun, I just can’t go the same publishing route that I’ve gone before.

Throughout his life, Fluegelman had a special relationship with San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge. “I think it’s a power point,” he said once only semi-facetiously. “I have more inspirations driving across the Golden Gate Bridge…” One day shortly after finishing his program, he was driving across while thinking back to the pledge drive he had seen the night before on the local PBS television station.

My American readers will doubtless recognize the acronym, but, for the benefit of those of you in other places: PBS stands for “Public Broadcasting System.” It’s a network of over-the-air television stations which show children’s programs (most famously Sesame Street) as well as documentaries, news, and high-culture content such as symphony concerts and dramatizations of classic literature. Although the stations are free to watch, they are unlike other free stations in that they don’t sustain themselves with advertising. Instead they rely on a limited degree of taxpayer funding, but most of all on donations, in any amount and frequency, from viewers who appreciate their content and consider it worth supporting. In some ways, then, PBS can be called the great forefather of the many non-coercive digital-funding models of today. And indeed, the tale of Andrew Fluegelman makes the otherwise tangential thread that runs from PBS to so many modern Internet economies much more direct.

For, driving across his favorite bridge that day, Fluegelman had a PBS-inspired epiphany. He would market his little telecommunications package under the name of PC-Talk, using a method no one had ever dreamed of before.

I said, I’ll just set it out there, encourage people to use it. If they like it, I’ll ask them to send me some money. [He set the initial “suggested” donation at $25.]

So, I sent out the first version of the program that way. I put some notices on The Source and CompuServe: I’ve got this program, I wrote it, it’ll do this and this. It’s available for free, but if you like it, send me the money. And even if you don’t like it, still make copies for your friends because maybe they’ll like it and send some money.

The response was really overwhelming. I was getting money! I remember on the first day I got a check in the mail, and I just couldn’t believe it. I almost got driven out of business filling orders. At the time I was still producing books, and software programming was my own late-night thing. And suddenly I was standing there all day filling orders and licking stamps and sending things out, and I had to hire someone to start doing that. I was totally unprepared for it.

While I had written the program to work very well in my own situation, once you start sending software out into the world you start hearing about people with all sorts of crazy circumstances that you haven’t anticipated at all. I think if I had tried to publish this first version of the program [conventionally], people would have reacted very negatively. But they didn’t because I’d sent it out in this unrestricted way. So people would write back and say, “This is great, but why don’t you add this? Why don’t you try this?” In many cases people even helped me re-program to deal with their situations. And I ended up calling that “freeback” instead of “feedback” because it was really getting free support back from the community.

The usually savvy Fluegelman did make a couple of puzzling decisions during these early days. The first was to name his revolutionary scheme for software distribution “Freeware.” If you twist your synapses around just right, you can almost arrive at the sense he was trying to convey, but under any more straightforward reading the name becomes dangerously counter-intuitive. Thousands upon thousands of developers who came after Fluegelman would work desperately, but only partially successfully, to make people understand that their software wasn’t in fact “free” in the sense that using it regularly placed no ethical demand upon the user to financially compensate the creator.

Then, having coming up with such a flawed name, the lawyer in Fluegelman came to the fore: he went out and trademarked it. He imagined creating a proprietary “Freeware catalog,” collecting a lot of software that was marketed on the same model. Accordingly, he also included in his program’s liner notes a request for other programmers with useful software of their own to contact him, thereby to join him in a “unique marketing experiment.”

In the meanwhile, PC-Talk’s success was such that it quickly caught the attention of the business-computing mainstream. Already in August of 1982, the widely read InfoWorld magazine published an article on the subject, under the heading “CA man likens ‘Freeware’ to user-supported TV.” Fluegelman noted sensibly therein that, rather than fighting against the natural desire people had to make copies of their software and share them with their friends, Freeware leveraged it. He estimated that five copies of PC-Talk were made for every one that was downloaded directly from one of the commercial online services or sent out on disk by himself in response to a mailed request — and, unlike a conventional software publisher, he thought this ratio was just great.

Jim Knopf/Button

Our second pioneer was a far more experienced programmer than Fluegelman. Seattle-area resident Jim Knopf was only one year older than the our first pioneer, but had already worked for IBM for many years as a systems analyst by the dawn of the microcomputer era. He built his first personal computer himself in 1978, then sold it to partially finance an Apple II. Among other things, he used that machine to keep track of the names and addresses of his church’s congregation. Knopf later wrote that “I liked what I produced so much [that] the program itself became a hobby — something I continued to work on and improve in my spare time.”

When the IBM PC was released in 1981, Knopf sold his Apple II and bought one of those instead. His first project on his new computer was to write a new version of his database program. As soon as said program was far enough along, Knopf started sharing it with his colleagues at IBM. They in turn shared it with their friends, and soon the database, which he called Easy File, went beyond his office, beyond Seattle, beyond Washington State. People encouraged him to upload it to the early online services; this he obligingly did, and it spread still faster.

Knopf was gratified by its popularity, but also bothered by it in a certain way. His database was still under active development; he was improving it virtually every week. But how to get these updates out to users? He included a note in the program asking users to “register” themselves so he could keep in touch with them; he maintained the resulting mailing list in Easy File itself. Yet keeping everyone up to date was prohibitively complicated and expensive in a world where most software was still passed around on floppy disks — a world where the idea of a program as a changing, improving entity rather than a static tool that just was what it was barely existed in the minds of most people. “How could I identify which of the users were serious ones – those that desired and required enhancements?” Knopf later wrote about his mindset at the time. “How could I afford to send mailings to notify them of the availability of improvements?”

So, in September of 1982, Knopf made a few moves which would define his future. First, he changed his own name for purposes of business. Worried that his Germanic surname would be too difficult for potential customers to pronounce and remember, he quite literally translated it into English. “Knopf,” you see, is the German word for the English “button” — and so Jim Knopf became Jim Button. (I’ll refer to him by the latter name from now on. Coincidentally, “Jim Knopf” is also the name of a character on a popular children’s television show in Germany.) Next, he registered a company that referenced his new nom de plume: Buttonware. And, last but by no means least, he added a new note to his program. “I would ask those who received it to voluntarily send a modest donation to help defray my costs,” remembered Button later. “The message encouraged users to continue to use and share the program with others, and to send a $10 donation only if they wanted to be included in my mailing list.”

The very first person to contact Button in response told him that his approach was just the same as the one used by another program called PC-Talk. Button found himself a copy of PC-Talk, read its pitch to other programmers interested in joining the ranks of Freeware, and sent his own Easy File to Andrew Fluegelman. Fluegelman phoned Button excitedly on the same day that he received the package in the mail. The two of them hit it off right away.

While they waited for Fluegelman to find enough other quality software to make up his Freeware Catalog, the two agreed to form a preliminary marketing partnership. Button would rename his Easy File to PC-File and raise its price to $25 to create a kinship between the two products, and each program would promote the other, along with the Freeware trademark, in its liner notes. Button:

My wife said I was “a foolish old man” if I thought even one person would voluntarily send me money for the program. I was more optimistic. I suspected that enough voluntary payments would come to help pay for expansions to my personal-computer hobby – perhaps several hundred dollars. Maybe even a thousand dollars (in my wildest dreams!).

As it happened, he would have to learn to dream bigger. Like PC-Talk, PC-File turned into a roaring success.

The founding staff of PC World magazine. Andrew Fluegelman stands in the very back, slightly right of center.

Both programs owed much of their early success to the extracurricular efforts of the indefatigable Andrew Fluegelman. Shortly after releasing PC-Talk to such gratifying interest, Fluegelman had given the final manuscript of his word-processing book to Doubleday, who would soon publish it under the title Writing in the Computer Age. Still as smitten as ever by the potential of personal computing, he now embarked on his third career: he became a full-time computer journalist. He initially wrote and edited articles for PC Magazine, the first periodical dedicated to the IBM PC, but got his big break when he was asked to join the staff of a new rival known as PC World. Within a few issues, Fluegelman became editor-in-chief there.

Not coincidentally, the magazine lavished glowing coverage upon PC-Talk and PC-File. The latest version of the Button’s program, for example, got a six-page feature review — as much space as might be devoted to a major business-software release from the likes of Microsoft or VisiCorp — in PC World‘s September 1983 issue. “What was previously a very desirable program is now just about mandatory for much of the PC population,” the review concluded. “If you use PC-File and don’t send Jim Button a check, the guilt will kill you. And it should.”

Button and his family were vacationing in Hawaii when the review appeared. Button:

The response was overwhelming. Our house sitter had to cart the mail home daily in grocery sacks.

When we arrived home, the grocery sacks were strewn all over the basement floor. We had to step over and around them just to get into our basement office. My son, John, worked days, evenings, and weekends just catching up on the mail. Life would never be the same for any of us!

Button would later date the beginning of Buttonware as a real business to these events. Nine months later, he quit his job with IBM, by which time he was making ten times as much from his “moonlighting” gig as from his day job.

Ironically, though, Button had already parted ways to some extent with Fluegelman by the time that life-changing review appeared. Fluegelman was finding it difficult to focus on his idea of starting a Freeware catalog, given that he was already spending his days running one of the biggest magazines in the computer industry and his evenings improving and supporting PC-Talk. Button:

Andrew got questions about my program and I got questions and requests about his. Checks were sent to the wrong place. The work required to correct all this grew exponentially. We had to make the separation.

Button came up with his own moniker for the distribution model he and Fluegelman had pioneered: “user-supported software.” That name was perhaps less actively misleading than “Freeware,” but still didn’t really get to the heart of the matter. Other names that were tried, such as “quasi-public doman,” were even worse. Luckily, the perfect moniker — one that would strike exactly the right note, and do it in just two syllables at that — was about to arrive along with Bob Wallace, the third principal in our little drama.

In this iconic picture of the early Microsoft, Bob Wallace is farthest right in the front row.

Like Jim Button, Bob Wallace was based in Seattle, and was a veteran of the kit era of personal computing. In fact, his experience with microcomputers stretched back even further than that of his counterpart: he had been the founder in 1976 of the Northwest Computer Society, one of the first hobbyist user groups in the country. Shortly thereafter, he was recruited from the computer store where he worked by Paul Allen, whereupon he became Microsoft’s ninth employee. In time, he became the leading force behind Microsoft’s implementation of the Pascal programming language. But, as an unreformed hippie whose social idealism paralleled his taste for psychedelic drugs, he found both Microsoft’s growing bureaucracy and its founders’ notoriously sharp-elbowed approach to business increasingly uncongenial as time went on. In March of 1983, he was for the first time refused permission to barge into Bill Gates’s office unannounced to argue some technical point or other, as had always been his wont. It was the last straw; he quit in a huff.

Taking note of Fluegelman and Button’s success, he wrote a word processor using his own Pascal implementation, and released it as PC-Write under the same payment model. To encourage its distribution, he added an extra incentive. He sent to any user who mailed in the suggested donation of $75 a special registration code, which she was then expected to enter into her copy of the program. When she gave this copy to others, it was thus tagged with its source. If any users of those copies sent in the fee, Wallace would send $25 to the user whose tag it bore; he later claimed that at least one person made $500 in these commissions. In its roundabout way, the scheme pioneered the idea of not just asking users for a donation out of the goodness of their hearts, but marking and altering the functionality of the software for those who sent in the payment, all through the use of the soon-to-be ubiquitous mechanism of the registration code.

But Wallace’s biggest contribution of all came in the form of a name. And therein lies a tale in itself.

Back in July of 1982, an InfoWorld magazine editor named Jay Lucas had started a column on “freeware” without being aware of Fluegelman’s counter-intuitive use of that term; Lucas took the word to mean any and all freely distributed software, whether the author asked for an eventual payment in return or not. The following spring, Fluegelman contacted the magazine to inform them of his trademark and ask them to cease and desist from violating it. So, Lucas launched a contest among his readers to come up with a new name. He reported in the InfoWorld dated May 30, 1983, that “at least a dozen” readers had sent in the same suggestion: “shareware.” He announced that he would be using this name henceforth. At the time, he still made no distinction between “free” software that came with financial strings attached and software that didn’t. He was, in other words, effectively using “shareware” as a synonym for all types of freely distributed software.

But when Bob Wallace saw the name, he knew that it was perfect for his distribution model: pithy, catchy, with all the right intimations. He contacted Lucas, who told him that he was free to use it; InfoWorld made no legal claim on the name. So, when PC-Write went out later that year, it described itself as “shareware.”

In early 1984, Softalk IBM, a brief-lived spinoff of a much-loved Apple II magazine, hired one Nelson Ford to write a regular column about “public-domain software.” Unsure what he should call the distribution model being used by each of Fluegelman, Button, and Wallace under a different name, he started off by employing the manifestly inadequate placeholder “quasi-public domain.” But in his May 1984 column, he announced a contest of his own: “A free disk of software and widespread publicity for the person sending in the best name for quasi-PD, contribution-suggested software. Since Andy won’t let anyone use ‘freeware,’ we’ll have to come up with another catchy name.”

He received such dubious suggestions as “conscience-wear” — “the longer you use the software, the more it wears on your conscience if you do not pay” — and “tryware.” But, just as Lucas had over at InfoWorld, Ford kept getting most of all the suggestion of “shareware.” Unaware of the name’s origin at InfoWorld, but well aware of its use by Wallace, he suspected that “shareware” would be as impossible for him to appropriate as “freeware.” Nevertheless, he inquired with Wallace — and was pleasantly surprised to be told that he was more than welcome to it. Ford announced the new name in the August 1984 issue of Softalk IBM.

It’s questionable whether the actual column in which he made the announcement was all that influential in the end, given that the issue in which it appeared was also the last one that Softalk IBM ever published. Still, Ford himself was a prominent figure online and in user-group circles. His use of the name going forward in those other contexts, combined with that of Jay Lucas in InfoWorld, probably had a real impact. Yet one has to suspect that it was PC-Write itself which truly spread the name hither and yon.

For, perhaps because a word processor, unlike a telecommunications program or a database, was a piece of software which absolutely every computer owner seemed to need, Wallace was even more successful with his first piece of shareware than the two peers who had beaten him onto the scene had been with theirs. The company he founded, which he called QuickSoft, would peak with annual sales of more than $2 million and more than 30 employees, while PC-Write itself would garner more than 45,000 registered users. Staying true to his ideals, Wallace would always refuse to turn it into a boxed commercial product with a price tag in the hundreds of dollars, something many conventional software publishers were soon pressuring him to do. “I’m out to make a living, not a killing,” he said.

Jim Button was less inclined to vocalize his ideals, but one senses that much the same sentiment guided him. Regardless, he too did very well for himself. Already by 1984, he was getting approximately $1000 worth of checks in the mail every day. While PC-File itself never garnered quite the popularity of PC-Write — about 7000 users registered their copies in the end — Button soon branched out well beyond that first effort. Buttonware would peak with annual sales of $4.5 million and 35 employees.

Those who jumped on the shareware bandwagon afterward would find it very difficult to overtake these two pioneers in terms of either income or market impact. As late as 1988, Compute! magazine judged that the two most impressive shareware products on the market were still PC-File and PC-Write, two of the first three ever released. But PC-Talk would have a shorter lifespan — and, much more tragically, so would its creator.

The founding staff of MacWorld magazine. Andrew Fluegelman can just be seen at the very back, slightly left of center.

The PC World issue with the landmark review of PC-File was still on newsstands when Andrew Fluegelman had his next life-changing encounter with a computer: he was one of a select few invited to Apple for an early unveiling of the new Macintosh. He was so smitten by this whole new way of operating a computer that he immediately began lobbying for a companion magazine to PC World, to be named, naturally enough, MacWorld. Its first issue appeared in time to greet the first Macintosh buyers early in 1984. Fluegelman held down the editor-in-chief job there even as he continued to fill the same role at PC World.

He was utterly unfazed to thus be straddling two encampments between which Apple was trying to foment a holy war. He spoke about the differences between the two aesthetics of computing in an interview that, like so much of what he said back then, rings disarmingly prescient today:

People [say the Macintosh is] more of a right-brain machine and all that. I think there is some truth to that. I think there is something to dealing with a graphical interface and a more kinetic interface; you’re really moving information around, you’re seeing it move as though it had substance. And you don’t see that on [an IBM] PC. The PC is very much a conceptual machine; you move information around the way you move formulas, elements on either side of an equation. I think there’s a difference.

I think the most important thing is to realize that computers are tools, that unless you want to become an expert programmer, the main thing that a computer provides you is the ability to express yourself. And if it’s letting you do that, if you now have hands on those tools, then you can be a force for good out in the world, doing the things that you used to do, that you’re still doing — representing your own ideas, not changing your persona to suddenly become a “computer person.”

And I think that may be the advantage of the Macintosh.

At bottom, Fluegelman himself wasn’t really a “computer person” in the sense of Button and Wallace, both of whom had been programming since the 1960s. And then, running not one but two of the biggest computer magazines in the country could hardly leave him with much free time. Thus PC-Talk was somewhat neglected, and other telecommunications software — some of it released under the burgeoning shareware model — took its place. Fluegelman accepted this with equanimity; he was never inclined to stay in one place for very long anyway. In an interview conducted at the very first MacWorld Expo in January of 1985, he spoke of his excitement about the future — both his personal future and the world’s technological future:

I think this is just the next adventure for a lot of us to get into. I know the intellectual excitement the [computer] has caused for me. It’s really been a rejuvenation, and anything that gets you that pumped up has got to be something that you can use in a good way.

I also think that people who do get excited about computers and involved in all this are almost uniformly intelligent, interesting people. I never have been as socially involved, as interconnected with as many different kinds of people, as when I started getting involved with computers. I think that the easier it is for people to express themselves, and to share their views with others, that’s got to be a good democratic force.

It’s great to go along for 40 years and still find your life changing and new things happening. It makes you look forward to what’s going to happen when you’re 60, what’s going to happen when you’re 80.

Quotes like these are hard to square with what happened to Andrew Fluegelman just six months later.

On July 6, 1985, Fluegelman left his office as usual at the end of a working day, but never arrived at his home; he simply disappeared. A week later, police discovered his Mazda hatchback parked near the toll plaza at the entrance to the Golden Gate Bridge. They found a note addressed to his wife and family inside, but its contents have never been published. Nevertheless, we can piece some things together. It seems that his health hadn’t been good; he’d been suffering from colitis, for which he’d begun taking strong medication that was known to significantly impact many patients’ psychology — and, indeed, friends and colleagues in the aftermath mentioned that he’d been acting erratically in the final few days before his disappearance. There are reports as well that he may have recently received a cancer diagnosis. At any rate, the implications seem clear: the 41-year-old Andrew Fluegelman went back to one of his favorite places in the world — the bridge where he had invented the revolutionary concept of shareware if not the name — and jumped 220 feet into the water below. His body was never recovered.

The legacy of those brief four years between his discovery of the joys of BASIC and his death by suicide encompasses not only the shareware model but also PC World and especially MacWorld. It went on to become arguably the most literate, thoughtful computer magazine ever, one of the vanishingly few to evince a genuine commitment to good writing in the abstract. In doing so, it merely held to the founding vision of its first editor-in-chief. One can’t help but wonder what else this force of nature might have done, had he lived.

At shareware’s peak in the early and mid-1990s, at least one glossy newsstand magazine was devoted exclusively to the subject in quite a number of countries.

By that fateful day in 1985, shareware was already becoming an unstoppable force, with more and more programmers throwing their hats into the ring. To be sure, most of them didn’t build seven-figure businesses out of it, as Jim Button and Bob Wallace did. Inevitably for a distribution model that placed all of its quality control on the back end, much of the shareware that was released wasn’t very good at all. Yet even many of those who didn’t get to give up their day jobs did receive the satisfaction and capitalistic validation of being paid real money, at least every once in a while, for something they had created. In time, this loose-knit band of fellow travelers began to take on the trappings of a movement.

To wit: in February of 1987, a “Meeting of Shareware Authors” assembled in Houston to chat and kibitz about their efforts. Out of that meeting grew the Association of Shareware Professionals six months later, with founding chairmen Jim Button and Bob Wallace. In the years that followed, the ASP published countless shareware catalogs and pamphlets; they even published a 780-page book in 1993 called The Shareware Compendium, which represented the last attempt anyone ever made to list in one place all of the staggering quantity of shareware that was available by that point. But perhaps even more importantly, the ASP acted as a social outlet for the shareware authors themselves, a way of sharing hints and tips, highs and lows, dos and don’ts with one another.

There arose more big success stories out of all this ferment. For example, one Phil Katz was responsible for what remains today the most tangible single software artifact of the early shareware scene. In 1986, he started a little company called PKWare to distribute a reverse-engineered shareware clone of ARC, the most popular general-purpose compression program of the time. When the owners of ARC came after him with legal threats, he switched gears and in 1989 released PKZIP, which used an alternative, much more efficient compression format of his own design. Although he sold PKZIP as shareware — $25 donation requested, $47 for a printed manual — he also scrupulously documented the compression format it used and left the door open for other implementations of it. He was rewarded with sweet revenge: ZIP quickly superseded ARC all across the digital world. Striking a fine balance between efficiency and ease of implementation, not to mention being unentangled by patents, it has remained the world’s most common compression format to this day, a de facto standard that is now built right into many operating systems.

Another success story is less earthshaking and more esoteric, but instructive nonetheless as an illustration of just how far the shareware model could be stretched. In a time when desktop publishing was one of the biggest buzzwords in computing, a veteran of print publishing named Gary Elfring took a hard look at the current state of digital fonts, and noted how expensive those offered by major foundries like Adobe tended to be. He started Elfring Soft Fonts to distribute shareware typefaces, and made a lot of money from them in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before the established vendors of word processors and operating systems got their acts together in that department.

I could go on and on with such stories, but suffice to say that many people did very, very well from shareware during its heyday.

Like any movement, shareware also came complete with internecine disputes. One constant source of tension were the many third parties who collected shareware which they didn’t own on physical media for distribution. As early as 1984, the librarian of the Silicon Valley Computer Society users group caused an uproar when he started selling floppy disks filled with shareware for $6 apiece, a figure somewhat above the cost of blank disks and postage alone. “It’s not legal,” said Andrew Fluegelman flatly at the time. “I’m opposed to it because when somebody spends even $6 for a disk, they feel they’ve paid for it and see little reason to pay again for it. I’m concerned about somebody building a product around my product.” But, in a rare break with Fluegelman, Jim Button had a different point of view: “With that [price], all he’s doing is helping me distribute sample copies.” He continued in later years to believe that “distribution is one of the cornerstones of sales. All other factors being equal, if you can double your distribution you will double your sales.”

In the end, Button’s point of view carried the day. Shareware authors were never entirely comfortable with the “parasites” who profited off their software in this way, and Fluegelman’s worry that many users would fail to distinguish between paying a cataloger and paying the actual creator of the software was undoubtedly well-founded. Yet the reality was that the vast majority of computer owners would not go online until the World Wide Web struck in the mid-1990s. In the meantime, floppy disks — and eventually CD-ROMs — were the only realistic mechanism for reaching all of these otherwise isolated users. The catalogers and the authors had to learn to live with one another in an uneasy symbiotic relationship.

Another, even more bitter dispute within the ranks of shareware was touched off near the end of the 1980s, when some authors started opting to “encourage” registration by releasing crippled versions of their software — programs that only functioned for a limited time, or that blocked access to important features — that could only have their full potential unlocked via the input of a valid registration code. Although Bob Wallace had ironically pioneered the idea of a registration code that was input directly into a program, he and most of the other early shareware pioneers hated to see the codes used in this way. For the socially conscious Wallace, it was a moral issue; his vision for shareware had always been to collect payment from those who could pay, but not to deprive those who couldn’t of quality software. Button as well preferred to rely upon the honor system: “Don’t get off on the wrong foot with your users with things like crippled programs, time-limited programs, and other negative incentives to register your software. If you can’t trust your users to pay for truly good software, then you should stay out of the shareware business.” Under the influence of these two founding chairmen, the ASP refused for a time to admit shareware authors who freely distributed only crippled versions of their software.

In the end, though, the ASP would be forced to relax their stance, and “crippleware” would become nearly synonymous with shareware in many circles, for better or for worse. In 1989, Nelson Ford, the earlier popularizer of the name “shareware,” set up a service for authors which let people register their software over the telephone using their credit cards instead of having to mail checks or cash through the post. The ease of passing out registration codes this way, without having to send out disks and/or documentation or do any additional work at all, probably led many more authors to go the crippleware route. In fairness to those who decided to implement such schemes, it should be noted that they didn’t have the advantages that went along with being first on the scene, and were often marketing to less committed computer users with a less nuanced sense of the ethics of intellectual property and the sheer amount of work that goes into making good software of any stripe.

In a strange sort of way, Windows 10 is actually a shareware product.

The buzz around shareware gradually faded in the second half of the 1990s, and by soon after the turn of the millennium the term was starting to seem like an antiquated relic of computing’s past. Even the Association of Shareware Professionals eventually changed their name to the Association of Software Professionals, before doddering off entirely. (A website still exists for the organization today, but it doesn’t appear to have been updated in some years.)

Yet it would be profoundly inaccurate to say that shareware died as anything but a name. On the contrary: it conquered the world to such an extent that it became the accepted means of distributing much or most software, and as such is no longer in need of any particular name. Just about everyone is selling shareware today — not only the sometimes honest, sometimes dodgy small vendors of “try before you buy” utilities of many types, but also some of the biggest corporations in the world. Microsoft, for example, now distributes Windows using what is essentially the shareware model: users download a copy for free, enjoy a limited trial period, and then need to purchase a registration code if they wish to go on using it. Many other software developers have stuck to their idealistic guns and put their creations out there uncrippled, asking for a donation only from those who can afford it. And, as I mentioned to open this piece, the overarching spirit of shareware, if you will, has infected countless digital economies that don’t involve downloads or registration keys at all.

Jim Button and Bob Wallace got to see some of these later developments, but they weren’t active participants in most of them. Wallace cashed out of Quicksoft in 1991. Ever the hippie, he devoted his time thereafter to the study and promotion of psychedelic drugs and other “mind-expanding technologies” via publications and foundations. He died in 2002 at age 53 from a sudden attack of pneumonia that may or may not have been related to his quest for chemical transcendence.

Jim Button (né Knopf) very nearly died even younger. At the age of 49 in 1992, he had a major heart attack. He survived, but wasn’t sure that he could continue to cope with the stress of running his shareware business. At the time, big players like Microsoft were pouring enormous resources into their own productivity software, and the likes of little Buttonware had no real hope of competing with them anymore. This combination of factors prompted Button to slowly wind his company down; after all, his decade in shareware had already left him with enough money to enjoy a comfortable early retirement. He died in 2013, a few weeks shy of his 71st birthday. He continued until the end to downplay his role in the evolution of software distribution and digital culture. “I’m not a visionary man,” he said. “I never saw the future, but I was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, with the right ideas and a proper amount of energy.”

Some might say that the “right ideas” are synonymous with vision, but no matter; we’ll let him keep his modesty. What he and his fellow pioneers wrought speaks for itself. All you have to do is look around this place we call the Internet.

(Sources: the books The New Games Book by the New Games Foundation, Writing in the Computer Age by Andrew Fluegelman and Jeremy Joan Hewes, and Gates by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews; Softalk IBM of May 1984, June 1984, July 1984, and August 1984; Byte of June 1976, June 1983, July 1984, March 1985, and September 1987; 80 Computing of May 1987; Ahoy! of February 1984; CompuServe Magazine of December 1990 and March 1992; Family Computing of March 1984; InfoWorld of July 5 1982, August 23 1982, December 20 1982, March 7 1983, May 30 1983, June 27 1983, July 30 1984, September 17 1984, October 22 1984, July 29 1985, December 23 1985, August 25 1986, and December 7 1987; MicroTimes of May 1985 and August 1985; Games Machine of October 1987; Compute! of February 1985 and June 1988; PC World of September 1983; MacWorld premiere issue. Online sources include The Association of Software Professional’s website, Michael E. Callahan’s “History of Shareware” on Paul’s Picks, The Charley Project‘s entry on Andrew Fluegelman’s disappearance, the Shareware Junkies interview with Jim “Button” Knopf, “Jim Button: Where is He Now?” at Dr. Dobb’s, the M & R Technologies interview with Jim Knopf, the Brown Alumni Monthly obituary of Bob Wallace, and a 1989 online discussion of the newly released PKZip archived by Jason Scott. My thanks to Matthew Engle for giving me the picture of Shareware Magazine included in this article.)

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/the-shareware-scene-part-1-the-pioneers/

[wineanddinosaur]

What We Ignore When We Toast the ‘Top Five’ Women in Whiskey

Heather Greene needs another article about women in whiskey like she needs a raging case of shingles.

“‘Top Women You Should Know in This Industry.’ ‘Top Five Women Who Are Busting It Up.’ It drives me nuts,” says Greene, the author of “Whiskey Distilled: A Populist Guide to the Water of Life” and all-around whiskey expert. “Are women supposed to be inspired just because another woman is in the job? That doesn’t mean anything to me. I’m not interested in women for women’s sake.”

By highlighting the success of women in whiskey, tech, politics, or other male-dominated industries, Greene says, these breathless headlines risk devaluing individual achievements. Besides, Greene has devoted her professional life to rigorous study of whiskey and is currently writing her second book on the topic. Should she be featured next to a semi-professional Instagrammer just because they’re both women?

Greene’s arguments are valid. Still, it’s slightly awkward because I am, indeed, interviewing her for an article about women and whiskey — specifically, the chain of mentorship and influence among women in the industry.

Young Kim, beverage director of NYC’s Flatiron Room, was a bartender when she met whiskey educator Heather Greene. Credit: TheFlatironRoom.com

My conversations with Greene and other women in the field reveal extremely modern truths. Instead of promoting tokens, or pretending gender doesn’t exist, we need to talk more about why having women and other minorities in visible leadership positions is important.

Recognizing the accomplishments of women and other minorities should be our first step, not our finish line. We need to explore the politics of being first, and the intense scrutiny that accompanies every freshman class, from distilleries to the U.S. Congress.

I can’t wait until the day when gender doesn’t matter. For now, it does.

An Extremely Short History of Women in Whiskey

Whiskey and all spirit distilling is male-dominated because, historically, the only paths in were via trades occupied by men.

“You might have worked your way up from a warehouseman to a mashman and so on,” Dr. Rachel Barrie, master blender at Glendronach, BenRiach, and Glenglassaugh, says. “There were very few if any women who got in. That route was closed.”

Only within the last few decades, as global appetite for single malt exploded and legacy brands were acquired by large multinationals, have there been more ways to get a job in whiskey.

“People are entering the industry who never would have had a chance before. You might have someone who has a history degree or a science background becoming a blender,” Barrie says. Her own career in chemistry put her on a path to become the first woman master blender of Scotch whisky.

Heather Greene first met Barrie 15 years ago while attending a sensory perception training at Glenmorangie. Barrie led the workshop, teaching the participants the science behind what they were smelling and tasting.

“I was in awe of her,” Greene says, “Not because she was a woman but because what came out of her mouth was fascinating. She made whiskey sound so enticing and wonderful.”

Barrie went on to mentor Greene, and the two found they had much in common beyond a shared passion for whiskey.

“Dr. Barrie sees the world as a poet does,” says Greene, who was a musician before making the leap to spirits. “The vocabulary she uses — I relate to that. I felt an affinity with her and the way she sees life. It’s not just whiskey; it’s beauty, it’s history, it’s how she views the world.”

Best Overall, or Best Woman?

When Greene talks about Barrie, the respect she has for her is clear. So is her stance that prioritizing Barrie’s gender over her work does a disservice to her accomplishments. When Barrie received an honorary doctorate from her alma mater, the BBC reported that she was “the first female master blender” to be so recognized.

Greene responded with her own article in the Daily Beast in October 2018. She clarified that Barrie was, in fact, the first master blender — male or female — to receive that honor from the University of Edinburgh. It was important to her to remove the metaphorical asterisk next to “female.”

“It bothers me,” she says. “The asterisk is crap. Let’s not reduce this woman’s career to ‘she’s achieved this among 50 percent of the population.’ She’s achieved this among 100 percent of the population. It’s not about who she is, it’s about what she accomplished.”

As Greene’s career in whiskey flourished, she became the director of whiskey education at the Flatiron Room in New York, where she briefly overlapped with a woman just starting behind the bar, Young Kim.

“I was wowed by Heather,” Kim says of Greene. “She was very knowledgeable and passionate. I wanted to be like that.” But, she is quick to add, “it wasn’t because Heather was a woman.”

As Greene did when talking about Barrie, Kim emphasizes that Greene’s gender is not the point. To express her admiration, Kim uses careful statements like, “she’s an individual person who worked very hard for her goal.”

“‘Top Women You Should Know in This Industry.’ ‘Top Five Women Who Are Busting It Up.’ It drives me nuts,” Heather Greene says. Credit: Instagram.com/thewhiskeyauthority

It makes sense that these accomplished “individual people” would bristle at being perceived as most notable for their gender. Doubtless, they have butted up against instances of tokenism or have had people presume that their career achievements are attributable to the trendiness of diversity, not because they’re the best at what they do.

Such qualifiers are devastatingly pervasive. In May 2018, when tennis’s Roger Federer told WSJ. Magazine he believed Serena Williams was the sport’s best player, writer Jason Gay requested clarification: “I have to ask: Did Federer, considered by some to be the tennis GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), just suggest Serena was the GOAT? Did he mean GOAT on the women’s side — or overall?”

(Federer, who has 20 Grand Slams to Williams’ 23, did, in fact, mean that Serena is the GOAT. Full stop.)

It’s worth noting that Barrie, who entered the whiskey industry a decade or so before Greene and Kim, seems less bothered by that persistent asterisk. This might be because Barrie came of age at a time when the idea that she might have risen in the ranks because of her gender, rather than despite it, would have been laughable.

Exceptionalism

Kim tells a story about a previous position she held, working in a Michelin-starred sushi restaurant where the chefs only spoke Japanese. The specials had to be translated to her by other servers, which annoyed the hell out of her. What if she was missing some nuance? So she taught herself Japanese, and two months later was reading the specials herself.

“You do have to hit the ball harder,” Greene says. “I knew that I had to be better. It’s just part of the game.” It’s a sentiment shared by minorities everywhere.

“You have to be excellent,” Barrie says. “Women don’t tend to be invited to the golf club — there’s not so much of that now, but there used to be — so you have to be extremely hardworking because you can’t rely on that.” Barrie recalls doing distillery trials in the middle of the night, staying up three nights in a row to take samples off the stills. “It’s just who I am,” she explains. “I always push myself.”

To have all that dedication and grit reduced to a novelty headline — “Whiskey: Now for Girls!” — must be tremendously frustrating.

Golf And Unconscious Biases

Last year, Greene led a session at the Women’s Media Summit in Provincetown, Mass., teaching a roomful of female filmmakers some basic whiskey vocabulary.

“Getting a film financed sounds like a nightmare, and it’s so hard for women,” Greene says. “What I was doing was teaching women the language of whiskey so that when they’re in meetings with men, they have a voice. Even if they hate whiskey, they need to know how to talk about it, just like women had to know about sports and golf.”

Perhaps Greene wasn’t drawn to Barrie because she was a woman. Maybe she was drawn to her because she saw a fellow traveler, someone with a similarly outrageous work ethic and a voice that resonated with her. As she says, they have a shared way of looking at the world.

And perhaps this is the same way men are drawn to one another — not because of conscious sexism or primal maleness but because of a common vocabulary, parallel life experiences, and kindred way of being. Because of golf.

When someone in a leadership role sees a glimmer of themselves in a plucky up-and-comer or when a bright young thing recognizes that they have something in common with a person in a powerful position, it can impact her career in both subtle and explicit ways. It would be foolish to think that gender — or race or sexual orientation or any of the other innate traits that impact how humans are socialized — plays no role in the forging of relationships.

Young Kim went on to become the Flatiron Room’s beverage director and a respected whiskey expert in her own right. Kim tells me that she delights in subverting customers’ expectations. “I don’t look like a boss,” she says. “It’s not only because I’m a woman; I just don’t look like somebody who knows a lot.” What does a boss look like then? “The tall male staff look — I don’t know, higher in rank?”

But Kim is a boss. And because of her — and Greene, and Barrie — maybe some young women just starting out in the world of whiskey will think a boss looks exactly like someone like Young Kim.

The article What We Ignore When We Toast the ‘Top Five’ Women in Whiskey appeared first on VinePair.

source https://vinepair.com/articles/women-whiskey-politics-distilling/

[mrmichaelchadler]

The Feminine Grotesque: On The Warped Legacy of Joan Crawford

This review was originally published on May 4, 2016 and is being republished for Women Writers Week.

“No wire hangers!”

That’s what comes to mind when most people think of Joan Crawford, more so than the professionalism and remarkable performances that mark her four decades long career. 

Shortly after her death in 1977, Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina published “Mommie Dearest,” a memoir detailing her mother’s alleged abusive nature, alcoholism and neuroses. Katharine Hepburn, Myrna Loy, her first husband Douglas Fairbanks Jr., her two youngest daughters and others close to her denounced the book. But with Frank Perry’s 1981 film adaptation, featuring Faye Dunaway’s shrieking, hollow, larger-than-life performance, the damage was done. In just 129 minutes the film unravels what Crawford had been building for herself since first gracing the screen in the late 1920s. It turned the image of Crawford in the cultural imagination into a monstress, a soulless camp icon to be mocked and reviled but rarely respected, and a cautionary tale of what happens when women put their careers first.

This misses how layered and beguiling Crawford could be—she’s a woman who embodies all the dreams every young girl has when she looks at the glimmer of Hollywood and thinks “I want to be a star!” and the cold pangs of yearning when the spotlight leaves. The image I hold of Crawford is one crafted from her various roles and interviews that have far more complexity than “Mommie Dearest” and her current legacy do. She’s one of the finest examples of how stardom works and is a powerhouse of an actress, despite the sexism and obstacles she faced from the same industry that made her a starlet. 

Although many stars from classic Hollywood struggled as they aged and the studio system that shaped them went to rot, actresses carried a heavier burden. Towards the end of Marlon Brando’s life he was an absolute embarrassment professionally and personally, but that hasn’t stopped new generations of actors from exalting him, as if screen acting didn’t matter until he showed up.

The 1962 Robert Aldrich film “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” reinvigorated Crawford’s career, along with that of Davis, her co-star. It also spawned the dubious “hagsploitation” genre, which is exactly what the word conjures. There is a visceral thrill in watching these aged divas and older cinematic titans hash it out in horror rather than be regulated to playing bloodless, supporting roles far beneath their talents. Films like “Hush ... Hush, Sweet Charlotte” (1964), starring Davis and Olivia de Havilland (in a role originally meant for Crawford) let these actresses form fascinating roles, and often disregard the rigorous expectations of beauty in order to deconstruct their own images in a metatextual manner. But the films in this genre often look down upon the leading characters rather than empathizing with them. In the last few years of Crawford’s career we see this strain of pure Grand Guignol. In films like 1964’s “Strait-Jacket” and 1970’s “Trog” (her final screen appearance), Crawford is positioned as a punchline.

Crawford took a dim view of her later career after “Baby Jane” saying, “They were all terrible, even the few I thought might be good. I made them because I needed money or because I was bored or both. I hope they have been exhibited and withdrawn and never heard from again.” She stayed in the public eye thanks to her later film work and a prolific television career that included guest spots on “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” (1967) and “Night Gallery” (1969). Her later career is spotty at best, rarely living up to what she was still capable of as an actress. These failures aren’t enough to undo her many accolades and amazing dramatic performances. They have nothing to do with Crawford as an actress. They are a byproduct of an industry that fails to see the rich interior lives of older women and fails to offer roles worthy of their skills.

It’s ultimately “Mommie Dearest” that cemented Crawford’s legacy as a campy joke. The very end of her career highlights a grotesque femininity that Christina Crawford’s book and Perry’s film expand on.

I’m not interested in parsing out what may or may not be true about Christina’s depiction of her mother. What does interest me are the reasons the legacy was undone by the memoir and its adaptation. The hits Crawford’s image has taken after her death are the result of something that was building up before then: a resentment of professional women. People are more brazen faulting women like Crawford as mothers and romantic partners because they openly put their careers first. In this light, her work in “Mildred Pierce” (1945) gains a deeper meaning as it concerns the price women pay for caring about their careers, the tricky emotional dynamics of the domestic sphere, and a fraught mother/daughter dynamic which predicts issues Crawford would deal with personally later in life.

Joan Crawford was a good, sometimes even great actress but she was also an amazing businesswoman. She may have come through the ranks of the MGM star machine, which changed her birth name from Lucille Fay LeSeur to Joan Crawford and made sure her freckles were never seen on-screen, but she had a hand in crafting her own image.

It should be noted that the stars from this era we remember weren’t really products of the star machine in the first place and were able to retain something essential about themselves even when going through the rigors of Hollywood during their early years. Crawford pivoted from setbacks like the end of her tenure at MGM to signing with Warner Bros. and delivering arguably the best performance of her career in “Mildred Pierce." She had the uncanny skill to adjust her looks to simultaneously reflect and seem slightly ahead of whatever was the conception of the modern woman at the time. Her films particularly in the 1930s and 1940s, which often paired her with Franchot Tone and Clark Gable, showed her as a hard-working young woman on the make, able to find love and success thanks to her own intelligence and sheer will power. Looking at these roles only through Crawford’s biography do her skills as a performer, and understanding of what film actors needed to bring to the table, a disservice. But her hardscrabble, poor upbringing undoubtedly lends these roles an authenticity and edge they wouldn’t have had if played by someone else. Even after having to mount a campaign of self-promotion to get the quality roles she deserved during her early years at MGM, Crawford wasn’t the kind of star to take up issues with the studio. Unlike other actors like James Cagney and Olivia de Havilland, who rightly fought their draconian contracts, Crawford was a professional and knew her limits even as she became one of the most powerful stars in the business during the 1930s. In the “Star Machine,” film historian Jeanine Basinger offers a behind-the-scenes story about “When Ladies Meet” (1941) that illustrates this writing, “Crawford knew her own stardom depended on being professional rather than always getting the key light. She was smart about her career—and cooperative.” Basinger mentions how Crawford mutes her performance when acting against Greer Garson, who was being groomed as a star, while Crawford was already well established and a few years away from leaving MGM. Even as the production team “clearly favors [Garson]” and the politics behind her place at MGM became more fraught, Crawford was always the utmost professional. This anecdote of actresses at very different points in their careers illustrates Crawford’s own professionalism and the short shelf-life of female stars, even those as beloved and well-paid as Crawford. That Crawford was able to last long beyond this moment professionally is a testament to her own acumen.

Crawford was kind to her fans, personally signing the photographs they sent to her; she knew what they wanted from her famous remark, “if you want the girl next door, go next door.” Crawford was self-aware about the beauty politics of her role in the Hollywood ecosystem. Placing her roles through the years next to each other, we can see a startling breadth of presentation. There's the flapper with the witty smile and slick bob that led F. Scott Fitzgerald to say, “Joan Crawford is doubtless the best example of the flapper, the girl you see in smart night clubs, gowned to the apex of sophistication, toying iced glasses with a remote, faintly bitter expression, dancing deliciously, laughing a great deal, with wide, hurt eyes. Young things with a talent for living.” There’s the lustful, independent dame with looser curls and tighter clothes acting against Clark Gable. Then there’s the career woman of the 1940s moving up in the world on her own, all broad shoulders and long hair. This isn’t to say that Crawford’s only or even primary worth was in her professionalism and understanding of stardom. Her career wouldn’t have spanned that long unless she was able to speak to her audience and be believable as an actress.

While I love the bitchy, sly mistress she plays in “The Women” (1939) and the fluidity of her movement in her flapper roles, Crawford feels at her most transcendent in later roles. 

Crawford’s greatest work shares a few traits particularly in how it highlights how she used posture to indicate character. While Crawford seems like an incredible force of nature, she’s at her most captivating when actually sharing the screen with an actor that can challenge her. There’s of course Bette Davis in “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?”, with each woman bringing a humanity and terror to their roles in dramatically different ways. But there’s also the uncomfortable mother/daughter dynamics that create the backbone of “Mildred Pierce," the garish “Johnny Guitar” that sets her against Sterling Hayden (1954) and one of my favorites, the brief moments she shares with noir staple Gloria Grahame in “Sudden Fear” (1950). Even though Grahame and Crawford barely interact, the film goes to great lengths to position their versions of femininity as dramatic opposites. There’s the lustful, underhanded fatale that Grahame plays on one side and Crawford’s rich, caring playwright on the other, who grows more and more hysterical as the film goes on. If the film was made ten or fifteen years prior, Crawford would likely have been playing Grahame’s role. Crawford shows an incredible understanding on-screen and off of the various compromises women make in trying to find success, romantic and otherwise.

One of her most emotionally realized performances came later in her career in the 1956 drama “Autumn Leaves,” directed by Robert Aldrich. The film delves into mental illness and an older woman/younger man relationship dynamic. But my favorite scenes involve Crawford grappling with her own loneliness, like when she goes to a musical performance early in the film and the world seems to fade around her. The light stays on her face, her shoulders slump and she softens as she gets lost in her memories. These moments show a level of tenderness and self-reflection that contradict the wild-eyed monster Faye Dunaway played her as and her own daughter believed her to be. It may prove impossible to fully wrestle Crawford from this image or shift her legacy so that it portrays the full range of her skill and complications.

It’s hard for me to choose my favorite photograph of Joan Crawford. In a career spanning four decades, Crawford provided audiences with many indelible images of womanhood even if history only holds onto one. But if pressed I would pick the series of photographs Eve Arnold took in 1959. One shows Crawford studying her lines on the set of “The Best of Everything [the top photo] her hand grazing her hair in concentration. In another you can see her gazing off camera next to Norma Shearer [pictured below] her eyes alight with a smile we can’t fully see, at a party somewhere in Hollywood.

Crawford was in her mid-fifties when Arnold took these pictures. The extreme close-ups of her lining her lips, or another photograph showing the casual intimacy of her in undergarments cradling the phone while speaking to her agent, could have been framed as a grotesque representation of what happens as icons age. But Arnold was a photographer of great emotional intelligence. What’s most striking about these photographs is that they express a humanity that doesn’t exist in how many remember her, thanks to “Mommie Dearest." Most of the images deal with Crawford reckoning with her own reflection—both literally in terms of the mirrors surrounding her and metaphorically in terms of how they detail her beauty process. Crawford, perhaps more than almost any female star in classic Hollywood, understood what was expected of her. That beauty and the power it brings comes with its advantages and also a price.

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My NotesBeing a technical person and someone that loves to program for fun I've always wondered how it would be for someone to start a SaaS company and never know how to code. I've never thought it would be easy but I certainly never thought it would be as difficult as this. Whilst reading my partners blog post I couldn't help but think how much it related to the struggle of being an entrepreneur and just how challenging things can get and thought you guys would appreciate the read and his Journey and persistence through it all.The storyWe were sitting in the middle of our open 2,500sq ft office with no employees; it was just my co-founder and I. We had big dreams. The hardly-used ping pong table sat behind us, somewhere near the never-used office kitchen. Looking to my right, I could see the sprawling white board wall that was covered in wildly idealistic mockups, surrounded by giant bean bags that were way too big for any one person.“We’re fucked.”I remember saying those words on a daily basis. We had burned through 6 figures of our own initial capital and we had absolutely nothing to show for it, except for a giant box of t-shirts and unnecessary office overhead.There was a precise moment we realized the agency we hired to build our webinar platform prototype was completely screwing us, and it was after we flew the CEO out from Turkey, broke bread, and played tennis. Turns out, there are people out there who will look you in the eye, take your money, lie to you, and do it all with a friendly smile on their face.We had gotten access to a link, which was the first version of a test room of the webinar platform we were building. We joined and, at first, I was confused. “Why are there two Indian developers sitting in a basement on camera right now?” We just sat there and watched while our hearts sank. Up until that point, we had imagined a large team based in Turkey working diligently on our project. Nope. Our prototype was being outsourced to $10/hr freelance developers based in India.It didn’t take us long before we found the right developers on Upwork, the agency profile, and the exact hours and amounts that were paid. The agency we had paid 6 figures to pocketed the money and spent a measly few thousand dollars to build the world’s crappiest prototype, which was more like 1/10th of a prototype.Our journey almost came to a screeching halt before it even started.Fast Forward to TodayNearly 3 years later, I write this article from the comfort of my own home. Our team is spread out across the world, working remotely to continue building a great product for our growing customer base. We don’t have a ping pong table. We don’t have giant bean bags, although I miss them. We don’t even have an office. We’re no longer playing startup; instead, we’re building a sustainable company.Things aren’t perfect; they never are. But we’re happy, and we’re focused. We’re not “killing it,” but our revenue is growing. As it stands, we’re currently hovering around $42,000 MRR. More importantly, we have a great product that our customers love.Our team is spread out from the United States to Jamaica, Ukraine, and other countries in between. The Demio team is made up of 7 full-time members and a part-time contractor. It feels like we always need more hands, but we make it work. As of today, that team is broken down as follows: 2 co-founders (David Abrams, CEO, and me), 3 engineers, 1 Q/A manager/support, 1 marketing director, and a part-time designer.Neither David nor I are technical founders, and yet, we have a very technologically-heavy product based around live streaming. We’re a webinar platform, so, by nature of our product, our team has been mostly developers from the beginning. A lot of the challenges we’ve faced throughout this journey have been technical ones, and it’s definitely been stressful at times.Things seem to be falling into place for us, and we’re truly starting to feel like we’re gaining momentum, which is a powerful thing. We want to keep that momentum rolling, and we want to do so in a sustainable manner.Our Road to Get HereIt hasn’t been easy. Getting screwed by that agency was brutal, but it was really just the beginning. We’ve faced a lot of challenges in getting to this point, and there were times when we were frighteningly close to shutting it all down.We weren’t quite ready to give up after the initial fiasco. We were hurt, though. We lost a lot of our personal funds. But we really believed in the potential of our product, so we continued to self-fund the operation, maybe out of insanity. This time, however, we did it differently. We decided we were going to be in control, and we were absolutely not going to rely on an outside agency. So, we started by hiring a couple developers; we wanted to build a real team this time around.And we did. A couple of our initial hires are still with us to this day, and they are doubtless the reason we are still alive and kicking.I wish I could say it was a breeze once we started building an internal team, but that would be far from the truth. We started by scrapping everything; I don’t think we used a single line of code from the initial “prototype.” We were finally making progress…until we hit our next major wall: real-time streaming. Turns out, being able to support thousands of concurrent streaming connections in a real-time, reliable manner is not an easy task.We went from one potential solution to the next, and nothing was working for us. We were going in circles. We were also going into a competitive market, so there were certain aspects we couldn’t fall short on, such as stability, scalability, and latency. In other words, we wanted to allow business owners to reliably connect with hundreds of people with minimal delay over a broadcast. As time went on and we kept trying to make this happen, more and more it seemed impossible.What’s worse is that we continued to build out the rest of the application and all of the ideas we could fit on our oversized whiteboard wall. Time went on, our application became more robust, but the core streaming feature didn’t even exist. Basically, we built a car without an engine. It seems ridiculous to think, but we were desperate. Because we lost months of time from the agency, we were in a self-induced hurry to get to market, so we were trying to build everything all at once instead of focusing on a simple MVP.The road to Beta was paved with multiple conversations around the idea of shutting everything down and calling it a loss. It’s not that we wanted to end it, we just honestly thought it was over, that we didn’t have a choice. We were always just a few dollars away from running out of money. When we finally did hack together a solution and launch our Beta, it didn’t last. We had to shut it down and, again, set out to completely rebuild our streaming architecture.Months later and, against all odds, we were finally able to launch a successful Beta. By no means were all of our issues solved; we still basically had zero funds, but it was a step in the right direction. And we haven’t looked back since.The Next ChapterThe last 3 years have been somewhat rough; I think nearly everyone on our team has faced some sort of burn out at a certain point along the way. We were in survival mode for a large majority of our company’s existence, and that can be incredibly stressful. But things are different now.We have a great product. We have a great team. We have growing revenue that supports our costs. We’re done playing startup. We’re done setting outrageous goals. We’re not looking to get acquired. We are much more interested in the idea of building a sustainable business; we’re here to stay.Operating in a live webinar environment is extremely challenging, and I truly believe it makes this SaaS journey at least twice as difficult. Our major focus as a team for the years to come is to detach ourselves as much as possible from real-time issues. In order to do this, we’ll continue to place a major emphasis on simplicity of product, which has been our USP from the beginning. So it works out well.Between my co-founder and me, our vision is to create a great company. We want to build a business that is around for decades to come, and we want to accomplish that with people we really enjoy being around. We want to create a great workplace for our employees. We want to have time in our personal lives so we can rest and operate to our maximum potential. Lastly, we want to create a company and product that our customers are proud to support.And we want to share that journey with you.Our first goal for this journey is to bring Demio to $100k MRR. As mentioned earlier, we’re almost halfway there at this point, but that doesn’t mean it’s definite. It’s going to take time and a lot of work, and there will certainly be a number of failures along the way.Here’s Why You Should Stay TunedWe’re not the first company to embrace transparency and share posts about our journey. However, it’s our belief that the ecosystem as a whole is better with more open and transparent companies. We want to help founders avoid the same mistakes we made, and we want to share our wins along the way.Between myself and my co-founder, David, we’re going to be continuously publishing our learnings as Demio grows. While we don’t want to necessarily lock ourselves into a schedule, our goal is to post at least two or three journey-related articles per month on our way to $100k in monthly recurring revenue.Some of the next posts we already have planned include:Why We Shut Down Beta at $2.2k MRR and Started OverHow Trashing More Than 50% of Our Product Actually Saved UsProgramming Interview Questions That We Use as Non-Technical FoundersThe Grand Opening Launch Method We Used to Get 400+ CustomersWhy I Burned Out and How I Got Back on TrackIf you want to see what’s next on wyatts journey, you can subscribe to the newsletter on his blog.