(1) Nicole Dieker at The Billfold says “Joss Whedon Made More Money With ‘Dr. Horrible’ Than ‘The Avengers,’ Unbelievably”.
Okay. Let’s compare two scenarios.
1) You decide to write, direct, and produce a 45-minute web musical. You fund the musical’s production out of your own pocket. It is free to watch online.
2) Marvel hires you to write and direct a summer blockbuster that becomes the third highest grossing film of all time.
Which one should make you more money? As Vulture reports, it’s not the one you think:
Joss Whedon shared an eye-opening fact during Saturday night’s reunion of the “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog” team: He’s made more money from his independently financed 2008 Internet musical than he did from writing and directing Marvel’s first blockbuster “Avengers” movie.
(2) Nancy Kress, skillfully interviewed by Raymond Bolton —
Many of your works delve into areas that require great technical expertise, for example genetic engineering and artificial intelligence. Yet, as far as I can tell, before your writing exploded, you transitioned from being an educator to working in advertising. What do you read to develop the knowledge base required for your books?
I wish I had a scientific education! Had I known when I was young that I would turn into an SF writer, I would have chosen differently. Instead, I hold a Masters in English. To write about genetic engineering, I research on-line, attend lectures, and pester actual scientists with questions. My best friend is a doctor; she goes over my work to check that I have not said anything egregiously moronic.
A career such as yours has many turning points, some striven for, others that blind-side the recipient for better or for worse. Would you care to provide two or three of the more pivotal moments?
The first turning point for me came with the writing of the novella “Beggars in Spain,” which won both the Hugo and the Nebula and which would never have been written without a jolt from writer Bruce Sterling. At a critique workshop we both attended, he pointed out that my story was weak because the society I’d created had no believable economic underpinnings. He said this colorfully and at length. After licking my wounds for a few weeks, I thought, “Damn it, he’s right!” In the next thing I wrote, “Beggars in Spain,” I seriously tried to address economic issues: Who controls the resources? What finances are behind what ventures? Why? With what success? My story about people not needing to sleep, which I’d actually been trying to compose for years, finally came alive.
(3) He grew up to be the leading fantasy cover artist – here is some of his earliest work. Frank Frazetta’s Adventures of the Snowman reviewed by Steven Paul Leiva for New York Journal of Books.
Frazetta is probably the most widely known—and revered—illustrator of science fiction and fantasy subjects, having gained much fame and a large following for his paperback book covers, putting the image into the imaginative worlds of Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Conan the Barbarian, among others. Several generations of young minds looking for escape into fantastic realms of adventure where landscapes were often dark and danger-filled, men were perfect specimens of well-muscled heroes, and women were beyond beautiful as their “attributes” were beyond belief, will never regret having made the trip. But earlier in his career Frazetta worked in comics and comic books, even ghosting for Al Capp on his Lil’ Abner strip.
And at the age of 12 1/2, stuck in his bedroom on a snowy day, and inspired by a snowman in his backyard being battered by a winter wind, Frazetta created the Snow Man. This wasn’t a gentle character associated with winter wonderlands and Christmas, but rather a righteous fighter against the evil Axis, which America and its allies were fighting in the Second World War. A few years later, at the still young age of 15, Frazetta created at least two Snow Man comic stories, one of which was published in Tally-Ho Comics, and the other that makes up this current book.
(4) Larry Correia pulls back the curtain on another corner of the writing business in “Ask Correia #17: Velocity, Releases, Rankings, and Remainders”.
So if you turn over constantly, stores tend to like you, and will order more. The more shelf space they give you, the more new people are likely to see your stuff. Success breeds success.
Here is an example. A bookstore orders 3 copies of your first novel. If all of them sell in the first week, then the bookstore is probably going to reorder 3 more. Then when your second novel comes out, they’ll look at their prior sales, and instead of ordering 3, they’ll order 6. Do this for decades, and it is why new James Patterson or Dean Koontz novels are delivered to your local book stores on pallets.
But if those 3 copies of your first novel sat on the shelf for months before selling, then the store probably didn’t bother to restock when it finally does sell. They may or may not order 3 copies of your second, but either way they’re not super excited about you.
I’ve been inside about 300 book stores since I started my professional writing career in 2009. I can usually tell how well I’m doing at any particular store even before I talk to any of the employees, just by going by where my books are and seeing how much space they give me on their shelves. A couple of books means that I don’t do well at that store. Five or six books tells me I’m okay. Eight or ten tells me I’m kicking ass in that town. If the books are faced out, that means I’ve got somebody on staff who is a fan (and that is incredibly important).
(5) Steven Murphy commences a kind of nonlethal Death Match with “Them’s Fightin’ Words: Harry Potter V. Ender Wiggin” at ScienceFiction.com
The following is the first of a new series pitting the merits and abilities of similar characters against each other. We open with a disclosure of the personal bias of the author then outline some ground rules and end with an example of how a fight between the two might unfold.
Personal Bias: The popularity of JK Rowling’s series has cemented Harry Potter as the go-to magical youth. He is the modern personification of the fantasy genre. The perfect contrast to Potter would then be the boy who personifies science fiction, Ender Wiggin of Orson Scott Card’s novel ‘Ender’s Game‘. The two characters have a great deal in common–both are children with the fate of their kind resting on their shoulders. I prefer ‘Ender’s Game’ over any single Harry Potter book, but I can’t argue that the Potter series as a whole succeeds on a level that the Ender series of books does not.
Ground Rules: The Goblet of Fire follows Harry into a series of trials that place him in a mindset that parallels Ender’s nicely. For my purposes the version of Harry with the skills and experience gained from this book and those previous will be used. The Ender used will be the one post ‘Ender’s Game’ and before ‘Speaker for the Dead’. This will allow the two characters to be roughly the same age. Ender will not have the assistance of his friend and database intelligence, Jane. The surroundings will compliment Ender in that the arena is the Battle School’s gravity free training room complete with the immobile obstacles called “astroids” for cover. Ender will have a blaster and Harry will have his wand. They enter the arena at opposite gates, neither with a clear view of the opposing gate.
(6) Tom Knighton reviews Chuck Gannon’s Raising Caine:
Like the first in the series, this one starts out somewhat slow. The action tends to be minimal and sporadic, but for good reason. However, the writing is good enough that it will get you through to the moments where the action picks up. Further, none of the other stuff is filler. Almost all feels vital to the story (and I can’t think of anything that comes up that isn’t important later on).
When the story does pick up, it becomes something very special indeed. That’s just Gannon’s gift, however. The previous book, Trial by Fire contained more of the action I prefer just be necessity, and that book was definitely on my list of “special” books.
While I don’t think Raising Caine was quite up to that level, that’s not a slight on this book. The only books I’ve read recently that were on that level included Seveneves and A Long Time Until Now. Both of those are on my Hugo list, and Raising Caine is a contender for one of those slots as well.
(7) The Nerf Nuke fires 80 darts in all directions.
(8) Tom Galloway, past contestant and inveterate Jeopardy! watcher, saw this on the October 12 show —
Heh. Today’s Jeopardy! round was a themed board on Game of Thrones, with categories Winter Is Coming, A Song of “Ice” and “Fire”, You Know Nothing, The North Remembers, Always Pay Your Debts, and wrapping up with Game Of Thrones, of course the only category actually about the work (specifically the tv series).
(9) Sometimes there’s a reason this news is hard to find — “’Lizard men abducted me to the moon for sex,’ woman claims”.
A former U.S. air force radar operator was abducted to the moon by lizard men for nightly sex – and was also forced to stack boxes.
What our reptilian overlords want with these sinister boxes can only be guessed at.
Niara Terela Isley is just one of several witnesses quoted by Alien UFO Sightings in an expose of the U.S. military’s secret moon bases – where reptiles rule, and humans are passed around like sex toys.
(10) James Schardt delivers “A Response to Charles Gannon” at Otherwhere Gazette.
At one point, Mr. Gannon used the term “The Evil Other”. I’m not sure he has grasped the full significance of this label.
Would you talk to a Homophobic Neo-Nazi that tried to hijack a literary award?
How about a racist who married a minority wife and had a child with her to hide his racism? These have actually happened! We know, it was talked about in such serious publications as Salon, Entertainment Weekly, The Daily Beast, The Guardian, and Slate. They had to get their information somewhere. Someone sent this information to them and they should have done due diligence. Otherwise they might not have as much credibility as people thought.
Now, those two characters, above, don’t even sound plausible in comic books. But these are not just insults that have been thrown at the Puppies. This is what many of the Science Fiction Establishment actually BELIEVE. With these beliefs, almost any action becomes allowable. What tactic should be disallowed when fighting Evil? Are you going to let a prestigious award go to a Nazi? Someone might think it validated his ideas, then you have more Nazis. Would you pay for a hundred more people to vote to prevent that? Would you tone back your rhetoric for any reason? You certainly wouldn’t apologize for calling them Nazis. That’s what they are. Good grief, we’re talking about Fascists, here! It cost 60 million lives to defeat them last time! Vox Day is sadly mistaken. Social Justice Warriors don’t always lie. When you are fighting for Good, there is no reason to lie. Social Justice Warriors tell the truth as they see it.
Of course, the problem is, the Puppies are not Nazis. Even Theodore Beale, the infamous Vox Day, doesn’t quite reach that level (probably). In the face of this, the Puppies can’t back down. Not won’t, CAN’T! They know. They tried. This is the biggest problem with telling the Puppies to moderate their responses.
(11) Someone was not pleased to see the topic heat up again —
OH SWEET JESUS PEOPLE ARE STILL WHINING ABOUT THE HUGOS JUST FUCKING LET IT GO ALREADY YOU PATHETIC TWITS
— John Scalzi (@scalzi) October 13, 2015
(12) John Scalzi did, however, enjoy explaining his now-famous Nerdcon somersault in the first comment on “My Thoughts on Nerdcon:Stories”.
(13) “A Harry Potter Where Hermione Doesn’t Do Anyone’s Homework For Them” by Mallory Ortberg at The Toast.
“Okay, write that down,” Hermione said to Ron, pushing his essay and a sheet covered in her own writing back to Ron, “and then copy out this conclusion that I’ve written for you.”
“Hermione, you are honestly the most wonderful person I’ve ever met,” said Ron weakly, “and if I’m ever rude to you again –” He broke off suddenly. “This just says DO YOUR OWN GODDAMN WORK in fourteen languages.”
“Fifteen,” said Hermione. “One of them’s invisible.”
(14) Kimberly Potts’ “The Big Bang Theory Recap: What the Filk Is Happening” sets up the next video.
Thankfully, just as so many episodes of Will & Grace were Karen-and-Jack-ed away from the main characters, “The 2003 Approximation” is stolen, or rather saved, by Howard and Raj. In a far more entertaining half of the episode, we’re introduced to the joys of Filk. What, you may ask, is Filk? It’s a genre of music that puts a science-fiction/fantasy spin on folk, and yes, it is a real thing. It’s also the reason that, for at least the next week, many of us will be trying to get the chorus of “Hammer and Whip: The Untold Story of Thor vs. Indiana Jones” out of our heads.
(15) Jurassic World gets the Honest Trailer treatment.
Spoilers.
Also not very funny.
On second thought, was there some reason I included this link?
(16) Because it’s a good lead-in to Bryce Dallas Howard’s defense of her Jurassic World character’s shoe preferences?
Her insistence on wearing high-heels throughout the movie, including a memorable scene that sees her outrunning a T-Rex in stilettos, was dismissed as “lazy filmmaking” by Vulture and called “one tiny but maddening detail” that set up the film to “fail” by The Dissolve.
The actress herself disagrees. She explained to Yahoo why her character’s footwear choice is totally “logical” for the movie, seemingly putting the conversation to bed once and for all.
Watch our exclusive interview with Bryce Dallas Howard for the DVD and Blu-ray release of ‘Jurassic World’ on 19 October above.
“[Claire] is ill-equipped to be in the jungle. This person does not belong in the jungle,” reasons Bryce.
“And then when she ends up in the jungle it’s how does this person adapt to being in the jungle?”
“From a logical standpoint I don’t think she would take off her heels,” she adds.
“I don’t think she would choose to be barefoot. I don’t think she would run faster barefoot in the jungle with vines and stones.”
[Thanks to Nick Mamatas, and John King Tarpinian for some of these stories. Title credit goes to File 770 contributing editor of the day Will R.]
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@Kyra
I’d forgotten Half a War was out. I really liked the first two. He did a good job of making book 2 stand alone to some extent, so I’ll be interested to see how he handles book 3.
Will @5:11:
In “Romancing the Stone”, the heroine is fleeing from the bad guys in the Colombian jungle, wearing high heels. After a little while the hero rips off her shoes (to her wild protests), chops off the heels with his manly machete, and hands her back the shoes. IIRC this is a sort-of-important moment in their move towards not disliking each other.
But I guess Jurassic World lacks Michael Douglas with a machete.
(I have spent several nights of guard duty with a VHS tape with that movie as the main entertainment. But that’s thankfully a long time ago. )
Sigh. Do the Puppies really have such selective memories that they don’t recall all the times they’ve called people Nazis/Marxists/Morlocks/SJWs/Christ-haters/CHORFs etc etc ad nauseum?
@Will R.
I’ve never met a high heel that was easier to walk in with the heel broken off (the soles are highly shaped) but I guess it depends whether the heel would constantly be sinking into the dirt or not. The higher and narrower the heel, the worse it is on soft ground.
@Will R
“There’s got to be a pony in here somewhere…”
Their mistake was looking for it with a chainsaw.
Also, for clarification, have the Puppies ever said why homophobe is such an inaccurate description of John Wright? And Vox Day? And Torgerson? And… well, you get the point.
“But I guess Jurassic World lacks Michael Douglas with a machete.”
Line of the day!
@Meredith Tradeoffs, there, I guess. On rocky terrain, I’d imagine the heel would also catch a lot. But point taken. I haven’t seen it…was she actually running? If so, I guess it proves it’s possible.
The first Jurassic Park was fairly decent–notably better than the book, I thought. I’m considerably less impressed with this one, and high heels in the jungle, while damned annoying, is the least of it.
And Puppies doing a thing and then accusing other people of doing it is standard operating procedure at this point. By now I keep track of what they have done by their accusations.
“Their mistake was looking for it with a chainsaw.”
D’oh.
#7 – If you look at the video, it’s clear the Nerf Nuke doesn’t exist. Even if you don’t follow the link to the April Fool reveal. Scenes of carnage are obviously just someone throwing handfuls of nerf darts at the actors. Nice concept, though. I’d buy it….
Any woman who has broken an heel will tell you that’s not a good idea. Heels shoes are not flat, and they are rigid: they don’t become ballerinas if you chop off the heel, they become S-shaped rigid things on which is it impossible to walk, let alone run. If somebody is used to heels, they probably are better off wearing them than either going barefoot or chopping off the heels. It is a sort of “what is the least worst” scenario, though. Heels will sink in wet earth and trip you.
Hypnotosov : “I started thinking about how lizardman sex would work, I mean do they have a cloaca, a hemipenis, a double hemepenes…? Then I decided that I might be overthinking this.”
Double penis with which they pleasure their human female lovers, um, twice as much at once. As explained in explicit detail in this documentary narrative…
(Quite frankly, the novels totally ruined lizardmen in any D&D games for me…)
Oh, man.
“Self-awarenes is not my strong suit” quote of the day from Brad T over at that Gannon piece:
That’s the Dignity Culture that says “I didn’t win that award, it must be because my writing wasn’t good enough.” Right?
Hey, Valueamerica was great if you didn’t work there!
Brief business description: buy at Valueamerica and earn a small percentage of the purchase price as bonus dollars (I think they were called Valuebucks) that could be applied as up to 50% of the value of a future purchase. Not too radical an idea, but they started dropping free Valuedollar coupons everywhere–all sorts of web sites and even in paper magazines. And there was no sort of coding to make sure you actually clicked through that site to use the coupon, and no limit on the number of coupons a person could use. And the coupons weren’t trivial, they were for 25, 50, even 100 dollars. TPTB at Valueamerica apparently never imagined people sharing coupon codes on web forums.
It was a bonanza–I bought a $250 DvD player for $125 (back when $250 was the very cheapest player on the market), a $150 Diamond RIO PMP 300 for $75 (and it came with a $50 ail-in rebate coupon, so total price $25), stacks of DVDs, and other stuff. (Even their packaging was clueless–a pack of Zebra pens was shipped in a box big enough to hold a microwave.) I was a bit restrained in the hundreds of dollars in coupons I used–I used each coupon only once. Plenty of other people opened multiple accounts and reused them.
You may not have enjoyed working at Valueamerica, but I sure enjoyed helping kill it. (Or, more accurately, helping it commit a very obviously predictable and inevitable suicide.)
Scott Frazer: Oh, man. “Self-awareness is not my strong suit” quote of the day from Brad T over at that Gannon piece
Wow, “self-awareness” doesn’t get any more oblivious than that, does it?
Torgersen’s entire campaign, all of his blog posts this year, and his response to the Hugo results were one long episode of childish “I’m being victimized… Puppies are being victimized” tantrums. If that is his idea of “dignity”, I’d hate to see what his version of “dishonorable” looks like.
You just have to laugh at someone who’s that clueless.
It’s good (and I suspect necessary) internal group politics for them to keep churning out the rhetoric, but I can’t help but think that it’s a terrible idea for them in the long-term.
Let’s consider:
a) They already failed miserably in making their argument to the Hugo electorate, and it’s unlikely that they can improve that performance.
b) Their rhetoric is increasingly in-group orientated. Any moderate outsider is going to take one look at their blogs and comment sections and think ‘Who are these bitter cranks?’.
c) I would include journalists amongst the ranks of the moderate outsiders. Puppies like to complain about coordinated media campaigns, but their own words provide the substance of the reporting about them.
d) The Puppies keep banging on about the small, greying number of fans who participate in Worldcon and compare that with the much greater number of fans at Comic Cons. In what way is that younger, cross-media, fairly liberal audience sympathetic to the Puppies? A group of bitter SF writers who don’t seem to be that interested in movies and whose collective brain trust couldn’t even nominate a single graphic novel for the Hugos.
e) Most importantly, they’re not focussing on writing books, selling books, writing short fiction, selling short fiction or creating new markets.
Larry Correia: “if you turn over constantly”. Initially I thought he was typing about sleeping badly. No. Somehow, I’m recalling the turnovers in L. Ron Hubbard’s sales department where his followers were asked to purchase multiple copies of his novels to prop them up onto the best seller lists. So much turnaround included the stores of Barnes and Noble getting his books with B. Dalton stickers on them. This kind of turnover?
@Johan P In “Romancing the Stone”, the heroine is fleeing from the bad guys in the Colombian jungle, wearing high heels. After a little while the hero rips off her shoes (to her wild protests), chops off the heels with his manly machete, and hands her back the shoes.
I’m quite fond of manly machetes, but the person who scripted that had likely never worn heels. Good scene, bad understanding of women’s footwear.
I can run in heels (an elective in Girl School), the stiletto/soft dirt issue is less of a problem running than it is walking and I wouldn’t even consider removing my shoes in an emergency unless they became an issue.
I parsed that as
(a badge in Girl Guides)
and it kind of made sense
I hate that scene. For one thing, I find it plays out as kinda misogynist — oh, women and their stupid shoes, even though, of course, she didn’t get dressed that morning expecting to go off on a jungle adventure — but also, as Anna points out, it was clearly written by somebody who had no idea how women’s shoes work.
I don’t even understand how women walk around city streets with stilettos, so I’m willing to accept “stiletto running” as a special skill that some people have, that would still apply in a jungle. Actually, ballet flats wouldn’t be that great for it either — without a strap of some kind, there are a lot of jungle-running activities that would make them fall off.
One of these days I want to see somebody do a parody of that Romancing the Stone scene, where it shows the female lead running along just fine on her high-heeled-shoes, until the male lead cuts off the heels, and after that she’s limping awkwardly on her ruined shoes.
—
That Irene Gallo quote is the puppy version of “Benghazi!,” isn’t it? They will never, ever, ever let it go.
@McJulie:
Galloghazi! In which Puppies of all emotional states and vaccination levels prove that they were not offended by what Tor’s art director wrote on her Facebook page by screaming about it for weeks and launching a boycott of Tor books.
Dignity Culture Ship Names!
You just have to laugh at someone who’s that clueless.
Torgersen’s dominant personality trait appears to be cluelessness. He’s also the most whiny victim who was ever victimized by an imaginary conspiracy. He’s perpetually offended and perpetually having a self-pity party of a victim tantrum.
Can I use ironic Radch ship names?
Mercy of Vox
Justice of Brad
Sword of Lou
rob_matic –
One of my favorite Puppy tricks has been the constant appeal to nostalgia, that things were better before and that the WorldCon Fandom has changed in the last X amount of years (differs depending on the person making the statement), while at the same time complaining that those same voters have been around forever and just keep voting for the same things which proves they’re an insular clique.
In an Ender vs Harry Potter fight as described would go to Potter. Post Ender’s Game the character was an exhausted emotional wreck that was struggling to come to terms with what he had done. Potter’s wand is far more flexible of a tool than a laser pistol giving him far more options, easily countering any benefit of the familiar battlefield for Ender.
Yet more evidence of the good-Brad and the evil-Brad personalities in constant turmoil.
Darren Garrison on October 14, 2015 at 6:40 am said:
Value America was actually okay as a job for me. I learned more there in 3 years than I did in 6 at my previous job. It was just laughable that anyone ever thought it was worth investing money in.
They wanted to be Amazon without the distribution centers. With the benefit of hindsight we can plainly see that one of Amazon’s biggest strengths is logistics/distribution.
As for Value Dollars… everyone in the tech department saw that coming. We were no strangers to exploiting a poorly thought-out marketing campaign (remember this was the era of Pudding Guy and his frequent flyer miles exploit)
Marketing did not care. Sales revenue was the only number that mattered to a company trying to IPO in the late nineties. The fact that our cost to acquire a new customer was hovering around $100 (no, seriously) while our average profit on any given sale was under $20 didn’t matter.
The whole thing looked like a pump-and-dump stock-wise. IPO at $23, trading at $75 by midday, closing the first day at $50 and then a long slow slide to delisting.
Then there was the time we accidentally shipped ThinkPad laptops to 300 people that didn’t order them…
Puppy rhetorics WRT Brad is that he’s not homophobic because he went overseas with the military to fight against ISIS, who are the real homophobes.
Of course, if Brad gets new orders to work as the ISIS towel manager in order to check Assad in Syria…
Frankly, any guy trying to lop heels off my stilettos would find himself in a close encounter with his own machete, but there is a reason why it is relatively easy to run in high heels. When I walk in high heels my body weight is already primarily on the ball of the foot, since that’s the way the shoe is structured; running lets you put all of the body weight on the ball of the foot, which also helps keep the heels out of the forest and/or urban grime.
Were my Youtube skills stronger I would find the X Files episode in which Gillian Anderson, as Scully, has to teach the actress allegedly playing Scully in the movie how to run in high heels; it is very, very funny…
An awful lot of traditionally feminine stuff requires skills that are hard to acquire and either ignored or actively sneered at once gained. Putting on makeup is one I’ve known about since a high school play. Walking/running in heels is one I hadn’t given much thought to (besides congratulating myself, in my less feminist days, over never wearing heels.) I still don’t want to acquire the skill myself but I can respect those who have, and if you tell me heels on is better than heels off in a rough terrain situation, I believe you.
Were I an executive on Dinosaur Island (or whatever they call it) I think I would spend some of my megabucks to buy shoes that looked okay in a business context but were also practical on trails, but that’s a different issue.
@Stevie
Castle has had a running gag of people wondering how Beckett runs in her heels. Of course the heels are mainly to even out Katic’s 5′ 9″ and Fillion’s 6′ 2″ heights.
ETA also see Scully Box on TV Tropes…
I was wondering what on earth a Dignity Culture was. Looks like Brad may have read this article from Reason. It looks like he didn’t really follow through on the references though, because apparently a dignity culture (as opposed to a honour culture) depends on internal validations of self-worth, whereas a honour culture prioritises external ones.
In other words, the fine inhabitants of his dignity culture shouldn’t care quite so much about awards.
A late weigh in on heels:
1. When you run, you run on your toes.
2. Heels mean that you are already on your toes.
3. They are not good to run in because the soles tend to be slick, not because they have heels.
4. The choice comes down to, does the person have enough calluses on their feet to be able to run barefoot over rough ground, or do even slick soles work better than bare skin?
5. If you don’t go barefoot a lot, wear the heels. (Or loot someone else’s sneakers.)
Regarding heels: I have, in fact, walked a mile in those shoes, and learned the hard way what happens when you step off the sidewalk and put a foot on the lawn with those kind of shoes. (I was lucky to be able to extricate myself without twisting an ankle.)
(Oh, and by the end of that Halloween, I had lost all feeling in my toes, and it didn’t come back until (American) Thanksgiving, four weeks later.)
I tried to (English Country) dance in my organ (the instrument) shoes once when I was thirteen or fourteen. They were mostly flat with the slightest of flat heels (for heel-toeing on the pedals), but had leather soles (for slipping over the pedals without catching). It didn’t end well for me. Every turn single ended with flailing to stay upright. Best not to speak of the more energetic moves. I think I ended up on the floor about three times before I gave up and switched back to my Converse trainers… And made plans to buy more appropriate dancing footwear. (Trainers, assuming you don’t have special dance trainers, which are awesome by the way, aren’t any good either. They stick to the floor too much and don’t have the flexibility either.)
And that’s why moving around in slick shoes is bad when you have to move quickly, especially if you have to change direction at any point. But some heels have grippier soles than others, and either way running on s shaped un-heeled shoes would be much trickier than just sticking to the heels and working with their limitations.
This has been a very good reminder to me not to imagine I have much clue how things work beyond my bubble. I am grateful for the education, and for the record, no one should have to go into a potential dinosaur zone with anything less than several good options for fleeing.
More for the If You Ran From a Dinosaur, My Love files.
My kid had a good dozen years or so of ballet.
In addition to learning how to do things like leap about en pointe, she also did years of character dance, which involved learning to dance in heels.
(As well as how to put on make-up, and put up hair.
It was all great training, since she sure wasn’t getting any of it at home.
And also great in that it was all presented as stuff appropriate to the stage rather than real life.)
Which is all to say, Ginger Rogers was doing it all in heels.
Admittedly not stilettos, still quite respectable heels.
So running, no problem, and if the soles tend to be slick that’s probably an issue for office hallways and not a problem in a jungle.
The rocks and stuff would probably scuff them up pretty soon anyway, which is what dancers do to the tips of pointe shoes – perfectly effective to prevent sliding.
So manly man hacking about with a machete is just being an uninformed – and overbearing and implicitly threatening – ass.
People who wear heels all the time can do pretty much do everything in them, except drive, because the angles just don’t work.
Which reminds me of the story of one of my parents’ friends, who forgot to switch out from her driving shoes, and attended one of Nixon’s inaugurations in flats instead of the fancy matching shoes left forgotten in the car.
(The parents gave money to both Nixon and Reagan, but it isn’t an inherited condition.)
Kevin Standlee on October 14, 2015 at 9:02 am said:
Regarding heels: I have, in fact, walked a mile in those shoes, and learned the hard way what happens when you step off the sidewalk and put a foot on the lawn with those kind of shoes. (I was lucky to be able to extricate myself without twisting an ankle.)
(Oh, and by the end of that Halloween, I had lost all feeling in my toes, and it didn’t come back until (American) Thanksgiving, four weeks later.)
Heels are the devil.
Women of my mother’s and aunts’ generation all wore heels as their default shoe, and often had vanity issues as to do with the size of their feet as well, continuing to cram their feet into a shoe size that may have changed years earlier.
As a result I’ve had the unhappy experience of dealing with several older women with literally crippled feet which had been terribly deformed by decades of pointy-toed heels.
It is not a good thing for someone’s big toe to turn inwards by 45 or so degrees at rest, with similar crowding of the outer toes, and I think there are also issues with shortening of the achilles tendon, so that flats eventually become uncomfortable.
I think their feet hurt them all the time.
Sigh.
Me and my Birkies, I think I’ll keep them, though they would be crap for running from dinosaurs.
I think the main problem with heels in a jungle would be if the heel kept sinking into the dirt, which depends on heel shape (stilettos on a lawn are a terrible mistake) and how wet the ground is. What we really need to know is whether it rains. 😉
If you were a heel eschewer, my love…?
@Will R — Says a man who has NEVER worn high heels.
Yes, if you have the strength to do so, you can break the heel off — but where would you find the time when you’re being pursued by a velociraptor?
Breaking the heels off does not leave you with a shoe you can run in. Those suckers are rigid and would be more likely to cause you to fall. Much better to take off the shoes and run barefoot.
Better yet — don’t wear the blasted things in the first place…
As far as heels go – when I had narrower feet and could actually get shoes with heels, I had ‘walking pumps’. (The heels were no more than 2 inches high, and fairly wide.) You might actually be able to run in them, and they had enough area to not sink in much. They were also relatively comfortable to wear all day.
@Meredith
That’s an amusing anecdote to me because I’m an active Swing dancer, and we specifically look for leather soles for their slickness. Many regular dancers buy good shoes then have the soles replaced with leather.
When Swing dance got established in the 20s-40s all shoes had leather soles of one sort or another, and the dance floors are all varnished wood. So it’s a style that assumes a certain lack of friction.
I frequently have to change from one set of shoes that are too ‘sticky’ to slicker leathers.
Oh, Lord, Will R — my apologies for the pile-on!
An actual Culture class of ship was the Limited Offensive Unit or LOU – I am not making that up. The name would double as basic metric unit of umbrage taken on a puppy related blog.
@Lori No worries! It’s been a good learning experience. And it has only increased my already great respect for the half of the population that is most often put upon by capricious (and even dangerous) fashions.
Heels. *shudder* The only time I’ve worn them was for something that was explicitly a costume. The flip side to the heels-as-iconic-female-gear thing, is that it’s extremely difficult to find nice-looking women’s shoes with no heels (especially if you have wide feet). And by “no heels” I mean “nothing more than a half inch”. I basically have two options when shopping for dress shoes:
1. Go to the “industrial shoes” department and buy something that’s basically a man’s dress shoe in a woman’s size.
or
2. Spend all day wandering from shoe store to shoe store, being ignored or insulted by clerks, getting steadily more and more depressed, and then end up taking up option #1.
I don’t actually want to wear masculine-looking shoes. I just want something that’s comfortable, secure, goes with my work clothes, and has a good price-lifetime balance.
(No “helpy” suggestions please. I’ve heard them all and they don’t pan out.)
Strangest thing yesterday… I’m re-reading Lev Grossman’s The Magicians because I just found out that it’s going to be a SyFy series (http://www.syfy.com/videos/the-magicians-trailer). (*)
I’m re-reading the book, and remembering it, and enjoying it. Then I get to a bit I would swear I had never read before — the nqiragherf va Svyybel, naq n ovt s–xvat onggyr! Then I got to the end of the book — the last couple of scenes — and I remember that. Scary. Maybe I need to up my meds, or take off the high heels…
(*) As an aside: between The Magicians, Killjoys and the upcoming Expanse series, SyFy is getting interesting again
One of the nicer things about the change in work attire over the last 40 years was the increased informality and switch to slacks making it possible to stop wearing heels to the office. Retired now, thank goodness, but with a couple of pairs of SAS pumps for when I need to wear a dress.
@Camestros
LOU Micro-aggression?
@The Other Nigel
A Magicians series sounds rather interesting. Coincidentally, I watched the first episode of Killjoys yesterday and quite liked it. I’m guessing you’d recommend it?
Grrrrrr.
I seem to have come unticked from this thread. So I’m reticking.