Hate Life, Will Travel

One of the big things that drives me just batshit about trying to do anything but particularly on the internet is the people who don’t know anything but believe they know not only more than you, but that it proves you have some ill intent.

For instance. Over at the good ship USSM, Dave took on a job to edit a Mariner annual for Maple Street Press. I’m mostly out of writing about baseball, but for Dave, I was totally willing to take on writing two pieces for straight freelance rates. We all got paid a flat rate. Well, we didn’t, because we haven’t even been paid yet, thank you standard industry practices. But yeah: $x and thanks.

Dave did a great job recruiting people, the annual turned out amazing, and as a result, it’s sold ridiculously well. I don’t know how well, but whatever. I posted on USSM about where to get it and noted in passing that we didn’t make any money for extra sales, so we’re not pumping it out of some naked greed.

One of the host of people that like to hang out and complain about USSM accused me of lying about it. While the money we made for each additional copy might only be a few cents, it was something, so I should stop lying to our readers, etc etc.

To review:
- I agreed to write for a flat payment $x, and signed a contract that says that.
- I mentioned that we made no money from additional sales in a post.
- Someone who has no knowledge of what our contracts were accuses me of lying and acting in bad faith because they believe they know more about the situation even though they have no actual knowledge of it.

And it wasn’t “I believe the usual arrangement is x, so I’m extremely suspicious…”

Seriously. This kind of thing drives me insane. Would you go argue with a particle physicist that quarks had three kinds of spin and therefore they were skimming money off the LHC and spending it on ripple and fast women?

Anyway.

“I don’t understand how Miranda and Samara can run around and fight in high-heeled boots like that.”
“Maybe they have anti-gravity or something.”
“But in the future women don’t have flats? Come on, Bioware.”

– actual discussion over coffee today

I read Matt Ruff’s book Bad Monkeys today – man that is good stuff. Recommended.

There’s a lot I appreciated: the wit, the narrative drive and how the story is honed down into something approaching a shaped charge.

“If we had signed to Gold Mountain management, or if we had signed with Geffen, maybe Crooked Rain, Crooked Rain sells 750,000 copies instead of 250,000 copies. But it was really just the difference between being Pavement or being Weezer,” Malkmus says. “I never had a great deal of confidence in my ability to write hits. There’s a formula to that, and I’m not a good chorus writer. I’m better at the verses. Sometimes I don’t even get to the chorus.”

– From Chuck Klosterman’s interview of Stephen Malkmus, of Pavement