Neil Gaiman, the fantasy and comics author, writes a journal on writing, free speech, fandom, and his own life.
HN commenters cite his posts on author entitlement, enjoying art by people you disagree with, and imposter syndrome.
"Without that consent, it is assault."
I hate to be contrarian, because by the standards in most cultural spaces in the US I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but I've traveled enough to know that there are exceptions to the exceptions people are taking with this material when you take culture differences into account. The majority of women in the majority of cultural spaces we on HN frequent of are saying it is assault. In those spaces and for those women it is. However this is not a universal truth.
I've lived abroad several times in different places and the behavior of women in certain culture actively promotes/encourages the behavior being promoted by this book. For example, I've lived in Rio de Janeiro (and several places in the US) and there in particular you are expected, by the women, to behave in the manner promoted by this book otherwise you simply won't meet women when going out to many night venues. Seriously, the nice guy approach will net you not one number in a nightclub/dance club in Rio, you actually have to "manhandle" women to enter into a conversation. I'm a decent looking guy and normally don't have too much difficulty meeting women, but when I was in Rio, my US-acceptable "passivity" relative to the culture norm in Rio, got me absolutely no where there. It was only when I forced myself to be physically assertive that women started responding well and flirting back and I started getting dates.
With this in mind, I honestly would not be…
- "Someone’s done a lot of find and replaces -- NEVER a good idea in galleys. Dave Langford put something in Ansible recently about how on the galleys of my novel Neverwhere someone Found-and-Replaced all the flats to apartments. People said things apartmently, and believed the world was apartment."
- "None of these were quite that bad – they were subtler..."
- "F’rinstance: All instances of the word round have become around. Fine for walking around the lake, less helpful for the around glasses, the around holes in the ice; blonde has uniformely become blond, and so blonder has become blondr; for ever has become, universally, forever, and for everything thus became foreverything, and we also got foreveryone, forevery time and so on. Each had to be found and caught."
- "Little things – the icelandic þú became bú, which won’t bother anyone who isn’t Icelandic. Blowjob had inexplicably become blow job again. (I think a blowjob is a unit of sexual currency, whereas a blow job is something you can get -- or indeed, give --instead of a wrist job, a sleeve job or a window job.) And once again every damn comma gets scrutinised. And I changed an Advertise to an advertize which was nice of me."
https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2001/03/ ("American Gods Blog, Post 24" [2001])
Most of the comments here remind me of the famous Neil Gaiman quote, "George R.R. Martin is not your bitch." [1] But I don't think that's the right framing. People buy the first book because they hope there will be a second, even though they haven't paid for that second book and hence are not entitled to it. People use your open-source project because you said, hey, here's this exciting new thing, try it out, so they assume you'd also want to listen when it doesn't quite work as it should. That's not about a false sense of entitlement or callousness on the part of your users at all. It's also not about freeloading, because a lot of those pull requests and issues on Github will be coming from people who publish their own open-source software. Instead, it's about managing expectations, like the post does. Put a big "this project is not maintained" warning on top, and nobody will bother you. Although I do understand that for larger active projects, it can be hard to explain to users exactly where on the spectrum between "don't bother me" and "I'll fix your problem yesterday" you are, and the bigger a project gets, the more likely you'll be to encounter people who enjoy exploiting your free labor.
[1] https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html
Reminds of this Neil Gaiman anecdote about imposter syndrome:
"""Some years ago, I was lucky enough invited to a gathering of great and good people: artists and scientists, writers and discoverers of things. And I felt that at any moment they would realise that I didn’t qualify to be there, among these people who had really done things.
On my second or third night there, I was standing at the back of the hall, while a musical entertainment happened, and I started talking to a very nice, polite, elderly gentleman about several things, including our shared first name. And then he pointed to the hall of people, and said words to the effect of, “I just look at all these people, and I think, what the heck am I doing here? They’ve made amazing things. I just went where I was sent.”
And I said, “Yes. But you were the first man on the moon. I think that counts for something.”
And I felt a bit better. Because if Neil Armstrong felt like an imposter, maybe everyone did. Maybe there weren’t any grown-ups, only people who had worked hard and also got lucky and were slightly out of their depth, all of us doing the best job we could, which is all we can really hope for. """
from: https://journal.neilgaiman.com/2017/05/the-neil-story-with-additional-footnote.html
> I would much rather have a system where even the most offensive people are encouraged to speak, and there can be a debate over their bad ideas.
Why on earth should we bother to entertain clearly bad ideas? If you're espousing white nationalism or transphobia or something, I don't want you speaking anywhere near anyone you might convince. End of story.
"But who says what ideas are clearly bad?" We all do! Neil Gaiman has a great essay called "Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech?"[1] in which he says:
> The Law is a blunt instrument. It's not a scalpel. It's a club. If there is something you consider indefensible, and there is something you consider defensible, and the same laws can take them both out, you are going to find yourself defending the indefensible.
The difference here is that my opinion is a scalpel. Everyone's is! There's no obligation for me to treat Milo Yiannopolous and Geraldo Rivera the same, even though they both have political opinions that fall far to the right of mine. One of them is indefensible, and it's not at all hypocritical or unrealistic for me (and millions of other people) to try to take only that one out.
[1] http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html?m=1
Every time I see a comment like this, I think of http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2009/05/entitlement-issues.html .
It should be an even exchange: you pay for the product as it is, not as you want it to be. Yes, when real life intervenes and the 12 novel epic doesn't get completed because the author dies (R.I.P. Robert Jordan) that is a bummer, but even then I find it very confusing when people go "I'd rather not even start reading until the entire thing is done" (and personally I think Sanderson's end to the Wheel of Time was very nicely done: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wheel_of_Time).
To the degree that the world of modern software and release early, release often have trained people to expect a constant treadmill of content I think that is a net negative: if you're worried about the author's pace stop paying and resume when they are done. "what's to keep him or any other author from walking away at that point?" sounds like you expect him to be chained to his desk until his output meets your expectations.
"As a consumer, it's bad enough when I'm left in this situation when there's been no money exchanged (such as a series cancelled with the plot mostly unresolved)." just sounds incredibly entitled.