Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded

366 Pages·2008·1.84 MB·English

by  John Scalzi

Y H M
our ate ail
W G :
ill be raded
A Decade of Whatever,
1998–2008
Y H M
our ate ail
W G :
ill be raded
A Decade of Whatever,
1998–2008
J S
ohn calzi
Introduction by Wil Wheaton
Subterranean Press 2008
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998–2008
Copyright © 2008 by John Scalzi. All rights reserved.
Introduction Copyright © 2008 by Wil Wheaton. All rights reserved.
Dust jacket illustration Copyright © 2008 by John Scalzi.
All rights reserved
Interior design Copyright © 2008 by Desert Isle Design, LLC.
All rights reserved.
First Edition
ISBN
978-1-59606-211-5
Subterranean Press
PO Box 190106
Burton, MI 48519
www.subterraneanpress.com
i :
ntroduction
By
Wil
Wheaton
I
t seems like everyone knows a blogger these days. Many people are
bloggers. It’s like being part of a secret club that anyone can join. All
they need are computers and opinions.
I’ve been around this blogging thing for a long time, almost as long
as John Scalzi has. I can recall with some amusement when newspapers,
magazines and “real” journalists and writers laughed at us. Many of
them treated us like we were a bunch of amateurs playing with the lat-
est passing fad.
I can recall with a great deal of amusement when these horrified
“real” journalists realized that the blog-o-sphere (a term we all hate but
continue to use, because nobody has come up with anything to replace
it) was not only here to stay, but was forcing them to join us or perish.
I can recall with supreme amusement when they finally did join us,
and then started whining that we didn’t play by their rules. We were
raw, we gave things away (for free! as in beer and speech, thank you
very much), we spoke truth to power, we were outspoken and impolite.
There were regular calls by these established media personalities and
companies for panels on blogger ethics. Sales of clutching pearls, smell-
ing salts and fainting couches skyrocketed.
Eventually, the old guard got over themselves and accepted that we
weren’t going anywhere. These days, blogs and bloggers are squarely
in the mainstream. Every news outlet in the world has several blogs.
Bloggers regularly sit beside credentialed journalists at press confer-
ences (and often ask better questions). When Scooter Libby was finally
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Wil Wheaton
put on trial in 2007 for outing CIA agent Valerie Plame in 2003, the most
comprehensive coverage came from a group of bloggers who were cov-
ering the story from inside the courtroom. Countless writers—includ-
ing the author of this book—have subverted the traditional publishing
process and released entire novels on their blogs. An entire generation
is growing up in a world where blogs have always existed and are just
as relevant to them as magazines and newspapers were to their par-
ents. The Internet, originally designed to facilitate the easy sharing of
information (not porn, as it’s turned out—not that I’m complaining), has
finally realized that intention. Blogs and bloggers are here to stay, until
they unplug the Internet and turn out the lights on planet Earth.
So what you’re holding here is more than an entertaining
collection of essays, stories and insights about everything from parent-
ing to politics to publishing. You have a piece of Internet history, and it is
your solemn duty to preserve it for the ages. Oh, sure, you can read it. You
can even read it twice, if you want. You can probably share it with your
friends and family (I’m sure John and everyone at Subterranean would
prefer you bought them their own copy, but I won’t tell on you if you
don’t) but when you’re all finished, it should really be placed in a climate-
controlled nitrogen-filled museum display, or at least watched over by
top men, because John is an OG blogger, and Whatever is an OG blog.
The Internet is serious business, people, and you’d be wise to remember
that, or I’ll throw you off my digital lawn and Skype your parents.
Some of you may know John as the award-winning author of novels
such as Old Man’s War. Others among your number may know John as
the guy who wrote The Rough Guides to Science Fiction and Space. But I’m
willing to bet the cost of this book that most of you know John as the
guy who taped bacon to his cat and put a picture of it on his blog.
I know John as all of these things, plus a few more that shouldn’t
be disclosed…but certainly merit a mention in passing, if only to inflate
the myth behind the man and impress you with my implied proximity
to his greatness.
Regardless of how you came to know John and his work, though,
you don’t really know him unless you’ve read his blog. That is where this
book comes in.
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Your Hate Mail Will be Graded
John is one of a handful of people who have been blogging since the
beginning. This is an impressive feat all by itself, but what’s truly re-
markable is how consistently entertaining and readable he’s been for the
last decade. I’ve been blogging since 2000, and I’ve been a more-or-less
full-time writer since 2004, so I know how hard it can be to populate a
blog with consistently worthwhile entries for a few weeks at a time, let
alone a decade.
I started reading Whatever about three years ago, because our mu-
tual friend Mykal kept telling me about something funny or insightful
his friend John had posted. It’s been a daily stop for me ever since. It’s
been hugely entertaining to come across some of my favorite entries in
this book. (I especially like the posts where John shares practical advice
for guys like me who hope to achieve some small portion of the suc-
cess John’s made for himself, with Fred the Cult Leader and Super Gay
Happy Fun Hour! coming in tied for second.)
If this is your first time reading John’s blog, however, you should
know a couple of things before you read any further, lest it all end
in tears.
John ignores the oft-given advice to avoid discussions of parenting,
religion and politics, and posts about these topics frequently. Unlike
most who tackle these topics, John addresses them intelligently, with
great humor and insight. However, if you’re very sensitive or easily of-
fended, John’s going to mock you as he skins and barbecues a barn’s
worth of sacred cows. I speak from experience on this point. John once
wrote about one of my most beloved movies of all time, thusly: “Star
Wars is not entertainment. Star Wars is George Lucas masturbating to a
picture of Joseph Campbell and conning billions of people into watch-
ing the money shot.” My natural geek instinct was to grab a pitchfork
and convert a slide rule to a torch, but before I could summon my fellow
outraged Jedi (or find a slide rule), I read the rest of John’s post. God-
dammit if he didn’t make a lot of sense. Sure, it helped that John hated
the prequels as much as I did, but his larger point about what Star Wars
really is, versus what a lot of us want it to be, was made with humor and
logic, and I eventually put my lightsaber away. I don’t know if funda-
mentalist Christians (John calls them “Leviticans”) or asshole parents
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Wil Wheaton
are as easily mollified, so you should absolutely track one down, give
the poor devil a copy of this book and grab some popcorn.
I’m close to my maximum word count (we bloggers struggle with
this limitation when we write things that will be printed on dead trees;
we’re just not used to having space-based limitations) so let me get
to the bit that I hope will be quoted on the jacket: This book captures
everything I love about blogging. This book is filled with awesome. In the ver-
nacular of the damn kids today, this book is made of EPIC WIN. John is funny,
John is sarcastic, John is thoughtful, John is insightful, John is provocative…in
other words, John is John, and I hope he never stops writing about and within
Whatever.
Finally, I would like to note, with glee, that most of this introduction
was written on a laptop while in a coffee shop. Contrary to what John
says, I’m pretty sure I fooled at least one person.
Wil Wheaton
actor, author, blogger
Los Angeles, CA
10
i :
ntroduction
Decoding
Hate
Mail
H
i there. This is the part of the book where I get to explain to you
what the hell this book really is.
In one sense it’s simple enough: This is a collection of
selected entries from “Whatever,” an area on my personal site where
I write daily on whatever subjects catch my eye (hence the name). I
started writing it in 1998, which in Internet years means I began writ-
ing in the Cretaceous Period—a time so far back in the mists of the
Internet that the word “blog” wasn’t in common use. We called these
online daily writey thingies “online diaries” or “Web journals.” I could
tell you stories, but I sense your eyes glazing already. Let’s move on.
People who aren’t familiar with blogs/online diaries/Web journals,
aside from being stuck mentally or otherwise in the early 90s at best,
still tend to think of them as written by one of three types of people:
Frothing political junkies, angst-filled teenagers, and people unnatu-
rally obsessed with their cats. I wouldn’t deny you can find all three,
of course (often in tantalizing car-wreck combinations), but there is
naturally more to the world of online writing than that. Several million
people “blog” in one form or another; tens of thousands of people do it
on a more or less daily schedule. Many of these folks are strictly ama-
teur, but then many are not—along with the cat lovers and the angsty
teens are scientists, academics, lawyers, sports enthusiasts and others
who write intelligently and knowledgeably about their primary subjects
and write entertainingly on others. There are even folks who started out
as writers in other fields and found themselves pecking away online.
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John Scalzi
I’m one of those. A few years before I began writing “Whatever,” I
had been a newspaper columnist, and then after that I had written a col-
umn for America Online. In 1998, I was, shall we say, between column
gigs, and decided that I need somewhere to write daily to keep sharp.
You know, just in case someone came banging down my door, demand-
ing I start up my column writing ways again.
In this respect “Whatever” was a miserable failure: Look, ma! Still
not a newspaper columnist! However, the Whatever was directly re-
sponsible for my publishing four books (including this one) and indi-
rectly responsible for several more, and it’s helped me land a number of
writing gigs online and off. And it in itself has become popular enough
that it’s afforded me a certain narrow level of online fame and celeb-
rity—not to be confused with real fame and celebrity, mind you (there’s
very little money involved, alas), but still interesting to have. In short, it’s
been incredibly useful in ways I couldn’t have imagined when I started
it in the hopes of getting a column. It is a prime example of something
that John Lennon once said: “Life is what happens to you when you’re
busy making other plans.” A decade on, I can’t imagine not writing the
Whatever.
The Whatever selections you’ll find in this book can be approached
in several ways. For the sociologists, it’s an example of early American
online writing: The “blog” in the first decade of the form. You’ll find
this particular blog does in fact read a bit like a newspaper column,
because that’s where some of my early writing experience was. How-
ever, these entries differ rather a bit from most newspaper columns as
they exist today, primarily because there’s no set topic or length: I can
write 250 words on politics or 2,000 words on the meaning of life (or
vice versa). No newspaper editor in his or her right mind would give a
columnist that sort of flexibility; one may argue this is to the detriment
of newspaper columns, but I think it’s more accurate to say that’s just the
difference in the medium and let it go at that.
For the historians, this is a time capsule: observations on the great
events between 1998 and 2008 (as well as many not-so-great events), includ-
ing a three presidential elections, 9/11, gay marriage, Hurricane Katrina
and the Iraq War. It’s also a personal history, because interesting things
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