I Have No Opinion On The Best Series Hugo Other Than Let’s Talk About Dungeon Crawler Carl

I have read a total of one book from all the nominated series, which would be John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War. Which is about senior citizens agreeing to go fight a war in exchange for spiffy new bodies. I read one, went “meh, I dislike body swap stories because they reinforce the cultural lie that mind exists separate and apart from the flesh when in fact they are inextricably interwined. Although I understand actors love them because then they get to do scenes like Gabrielle-in-Xena’s-body.“

Bodyswapping is right up there with psionics on my personal list of “science fiction tropes that convince me to close the book unless it’s done in the name of humor.” I got exposed to too much Jack L. Chalker during my formative phase of science fiction. Not interested. 

And the Dungeon Crawler Carl series is full of horrible things being done in the name of humor, with body swapping one of the least unpleasant options. I’ve been in love with this series after picking it up for an airplane flight. It swiftly made the extremely short list of books that have gotten me to laugh out loud on a plane so the other travelers think I’m a lunatic. Right up there with Robert Sheckley. Thanks a lot, Matt Dinniman. 

I had no clue previously that LitRPG was even a thing, but now I’m seriously thinking about trying to write it, after I get done with my trial novel, unless I just decide to write trial novels forever, since that’s a smaller field where it’s much easier to monopolize all the awards, especially if my trial novels are also funny. 

The Carl series takes place inside a game. Evil aliens come to Earth, kill most of us, and put the rest in a Live Action Roleplaying Game which is disgustingly bloody, as well as a very profitable stream. Our hero, Carl, makes it past the initial extinction event with his ex-girlfriend’s cat, Princess Donut. Who soon becomes sentient, and reveals herself to be a formidable player character, with magic missiles and a high charisma score. 

There are seven books so far, with eight coming out in a couple weeks, documenting Carl’s progression to deeper levels of the dungeon, and the dangers found therein, and the amazing loot one can win for persevering. Carl is a steadfast bloke whose motto is “You Will Not Break Me” and in my mind, he looks kind of like young Bruce Campbell in the Evil Dead series, which is a good approximation of the humor/violence threshhold setting in the Carl books. And since Carl is a blue-collar guy with a knack for explosives, his point of view has lots of info dumps about how the trains work, contrasted with fleeting flashes of character development that fester into emotional gut punches later on in the journey. 

There’s currently a Kickstarter happening for a RPG (and also a Card G) based on the Carl-verse, and I’m awfully close to investing in that, and even finding myself a group of deviant humans to game with once it’s launched, even though I haven’t done a childish silly thing like join a RPG campaign in ages. In the meantime, these guys have more fan art available than BTS and Phish combined, with an extraordinary creative out put that includes sculpture, all kinds of visual art, fanfic, posters, t-shirts, and something very near and dear to my heart: jacket patches.

Which feature heavily as a plot point in DC Carl, since Dinniman is a metal guy (and a fellow bass player), so at a certain point Carl gets equipped with a literal battle jacket. 

(I’m an old lady so I have a @ConcertCommandoCoat instead that includes multigenres in addition to punk metal, such as K-Pop and Hawaiian, but once I went over 100 patches I gave it an Instagram of its own.)

Carl’s saga, which follows the Campbell scheme nicely and will remind some readers of the Odyssey and similar, is told in an inelegant everybro style that will probably make many Hugo voters grind their teeth. Packed full of gamer jargon to reflect its original genre. Not afraid to go for the gross jokes. The style is a mixed bag, written at a furious pace, with cringey cliches rubbing elbows with quotes that take up residence in your daily vocabulary. Multiple emotions are evoked. Plus there’s a convoluted-ass plot like no other, with multiple factions and interests, and story arcs that take hundreds of pages to resolve. 

I am in awe, plus I am envious, and even more, I am amazed at how this dude managed to write so good that he parlayed a fanfic from a genre nobody’s ever heard of into a TV deal, vast amounts of merch, a fanfollowing that has thrown over $6m (at this point) at his $250k Kickstarter which has multiple VIP tiers, anyway. It’s all deserved. This is some good shit, fellow word addicts. 

I’m not sure the Hugo base is ready for it though. While Carl does not violate a single one of our hallowed precepts of wokeness, with abundant representation for all, including Mongolians, Icelandics (is that the right word?) and sentient fish, and a political plot that actually succeeds in uniting maga and liberal fans against the evil corporate scumbags controlling this dystopia and their bootlicking AI, there’s some gross childish humor. Dick jokes. Poop jokes. Gory viscera jokes. Hell, the jokes never stop coming, and some of them probably shouldn’t be read while you are taking a sip of your beverage. 

So yeah, Best Series is yet one of the categories I’m avoiding. Along with the editor/artist/podcast type stuff. Maybe I’ll check out the fan things, and I also note with dismay that I own one of the YA nominees (the latest Hunger Games) so I guess I might as well read them all.

But not after Carl. Immediately after my first reading of the Carl series I turned right around to read it AGAIN, because I love it that much. I haven’t done that with a book since probably Watership Down or something ancient like that, where you go “whoa, what did I just read???” And dive right back in because you’re not ready for the mundane world yet. 

Review: Related Work: The Cuddled Little Vice (Sandman) by Elizabeth Sandifer

This gets my vote for Related Work, although the piece about Octavia Butler may change my mind. And it was a surprise. Not the fact that a Neil Gaiman expose made it onto Related Works, but the fact that this one goes a little deeper, exploring his roots in Scientology, and Scientology’s roots in Thelema via Jack Parsons. And Scientology goes back with Worldcon too, and the Hugos. 

I was involved with Thelema, once upon a time, and I was romantically involved with Jim Graeb for a few years, and he was the attorney who incorporated the OTO, as well as a high-ranking member, and he was also a good friend of Helen Parsons Smith, Jack’s widow. So I know a few things that I’m not likely to repeat, about Jack Parsons and that whole scene, and I’ve watched Jack’s rep evolve over the years, to the point where Breaking Bad is throwing in an overblown Parsons reference as dramatic punctuation, and Jack himself is viewed as some kind of playboy sorceror stud in between classified rocket launches. 

That was during my paranormal exploration phase, in which I was checking out fringe religions and haunted houses, endeavoring to confirm my belief none of that stuff is real. Which I did (for the most part), but I also met lots of wacky and entertaining people, who were quite real. And I will note that while Jack Parsons was also quite real, he was a saint compared to his acolyte L. Ron, who had access to the same kind of knowledge but used it for accumulating money and power, while Parsons was more of a true believer in the core philosophy about doing what thou wilt, and about transitioning into the age of the individual (happened very recently, according to the astrology). 

During that time I was juggling three or more lives. I was working downtown as a legal secretary/slash computer wrangler, and pretending to be a boring nerd, and then at night I was doing my creative thing which involved working on unfinished novels and playing forgettable music, and writing silly features for the alternative press – best-ofs, reviews, and a quirky astrology column. I certainly knew enough about that sort of thing from hanging around with people like Helen Parsons Smith, and Jim, both of whom I have now outlived. That was life number three, hanging around with Jim and his friends, who were an eclectic circle of Northern California occultists, neopagans, philosophers, queers, stoners, artists, writers, and weirdos (some of us were multiple categories) (these days you could probably just say “neurodivergents”). 

I remember one time some bright-eyed co-writer at the alternative paper tried to sneak into my business on a weekend when I was headed to spend a weekend taking acid in the woods with some of that crew. Fritz Leiber showed up that time. And I had to exert myself somewhat in making excuses because she was barely out of college and new to San Francisco, and there was no way I was going to turn her loose in that crowd with psychedelics involved. Several years later someone linked me an article she had written – all about the scary individual known as Jack Parsons! I guess eventually she found out, but I’m glad I didn’t have to help. 

Neil Gaiman was quite popular in those circles too, especially Good Omens, which was a parody of the Satanic Panic style theology that was popular back then, and my whole reason for wanting to investigate the occultists. Were they really skulking around doing evil shit, and hiding evidence of psionics and UFOs from the government? 

Nah, just a bunch of nerds that weren’t completely heterosexual who liked getting high on weed and psychedelics. I didn’t see much actual evil. I saw one pedophile and he got thrown in prison immediately after that fact came to light. The occult people I hung out with were brutal with regard to exiling people such as pedophiles, heroin addicts, large scale dealers, perpetrators of cruelty to animals, and anyone else who might possibly bring the authorities into their sex and drug scene. 

There were other crowds where things were different, such as Marion Zimmer Bradley’s clique in the Oakland Hills, where bad things happened to kids. 

Everyone was part of this big sprawling counterculture hippie scene, trying to get rich in this better future everyone was supposedly creating. Looking at the one they wound up building, I’d say they needed a few more project managers. If you were in the Bay Area, and smart, you wound up in this scene at some level, whether as a gamer or a commie or a musician, a pothead, a queer, a person with an extra convoluted brain. Lots of things came out of this scene, like techies, and Deadheads, and lava lamps. All of them certain we’d be building statues of their visionary asses as we enjoyed all-you-can-eat socialist hippie utopia in the age of Aquarius. 

But instead, they handed the reins to a bunch of sociopaths like L. Ron Hubbard and Jeffrey Epstein, and here we are, all collectively tossing our retirement savings in the hat so a bunch of ugly old men with too much money can go to parties with lots of cocaine and sex, like we were doing back in the day, except the  men were attractive enough so they didn't have to blackmail/coerce people to get laid. And everyone else has to do a GoFundMe to get medical care. 

I digress. Cough. We were talking about Neil Gaiman, and this post is specifically about him and his upbringing and belief structure. Which is covered extensively along with his work, and a chronology of his rather disgusting sexual assaults. 

I’ve only read two of Gaman’s books, both of them gifts from someone else. First there was Good Omens, which someone gave Jim, and I read it to him on a long car trip, because that was how we used to entertain each other when we weren’t doing cocaine sex magick orgies. We also played a lot of chess, and tinkered with computers. If there was one thing I saw plenty of during my occult escapades it was nerds doing nerd things. We would pass along books, especially if we noticed in jokes, and Good Omens was like that. A rollicking story of kids having a Goonies type adventure (that was Pratchett’s part, according to this piece) and a cynical tale about the demon Crowley and the angel Aziraphale, which was Gaiman’s contribution, chock full of occultist in jokes.

After I’d been with Jim a few years we parted and headed in separate directions, because I was about to hit thirty and wanted to try for kids, just not with him. The guy I tried with happened to be carrying a copy of Good Omens around at a party and that was the main reason I talked to him. Turned out he hadn’t read it, someone else had just given it to him. We ended up getting married, although the kid thing didn’t work out, which was a good thing because neither did the marriage. 

Someone else ended up giving me another Neil Gaiman book though, a paralegal at the law firm where I was working. He was probably trying for the “let me blow your mind with this shocking occulty novel in which pagan gods come to life, nerd woman!” kind of angle without realizing I’d been out of that phase for at least a decade but yeah, I was well aware of different pantheons, like any good gamer nerd with a side helping of goth. 

And I did not like the book – American Gods – because it had that same kind of bleak nihilistic coating as the dude in Good Omens, except the decay was more pronounced, and that happens a lot with occultists. Some, like for instance Helen Parsons Smith, manage to hang onto their marbles well into their twilight years, while others turn predatory, like Hubbard, and Gaiman, and seek increasing levels of debauch. 

I ended up returning the American Gods book gift with one about human zoos – specifically, a bunch of Native Americans who lived as performers and zoo inhabitants in Paris, doing wild west shows on the weekend and raising their families in enclosures where tourists would pay to gawk. Human zoos really were a thing back in the day, and I remember my mind being absolutely blown by that knowledge. I will see your tale of bleak nihilism, sir, and raise you one existentialist horror. 

American neo-religions come out of both man’s endless desire for knowledge and man’s endless craving for wealth, and religion creation is a longstanding industry here, with occasional cults like the Mormons and the 7th Day Adventists hitting the jackpot. Crowley, who was a forward-thinker (that’s what I liked about him among his less admirable qualities), set about analyzing all these religions in an attempt to create his very own (with blackjack and hookers) and his disciples continue in that tradition to this day. 

And it does leave a mark on their artistic work that folks accustomed to the jargon will notice (fnord), having a passing familiarity with the same body of work. As Crowley once said, “our method is science, our aim is religion.” His aim with Thelema was to create something a little more user friendly, with less sexism, while retaining all the ceremonies and myths. But rather than following his religion, most of his disciples prefer to try starting their own.  With varying levels of success. 

Gaiman probably would have had a good shot at being a cult leader, given the body of mythology he was creating. I really appreciated this overview of his work, and since none of the other Related Works are calling to me, it gets my vote. I’ve seen way too much gee-whiz lionization of Old Mercury Fulminate breath over the last couple decades, it’s high time people put down the Great Man pipe and spent some time learning about the ecosystem around him and how it influenced a lot of today’s weirdness. 

If you ask me for exciting stories of demons and paranormal manifestations and summonings andspells, I’m going to give you a blank look. Didn’t happen. No time travel. No aliens. No sacrifices aside from a lot of doobies, and one time  people killed a chicken, and then cooked it, and ate it. All the other animals were treated like spoiled pets. I saw lots of dudes reading books, and sometimes we threw wild parties where people got high and sometimes fucked each other. 

I saw lots of people desperate to learn occult secrets and get admitted to the high ranks of the illumnati so they could go spy on the rich dudes at the Bohemian Grove and learn all the secrets about psionics and space aliens. They tend to get pissy when their fantasies don’t pan out and they learned it was mostly a book group for smart misfits.  I’ve met way more felons working in law firms than I ever did hanging around with occultists. I can’t even say that their belief systems are necessarily that bad, since there are plenty of them involved in nicer activities, like helping people use creative visualization and meditation techniques to help with pain control. 

You can tell a lot about a culture by what knowledge it considers worth hiding – occultism just means knowledge that is hidden, often because it’s dangerous but sometimes just because it’s foreign or clashes with the dominant religion. The occultism that informed Parsons, Crowley, and Gaiman holds that religion is something created by humans, and you can create one too, because it’s not like lightning’s going to strike you. 

Some people use that knowledge in creative ways, like the performance I saw last weekend with Trent Reznor yowling “God is dead and no one cares” at the top of his lungs while putting on a banger of a concert. Sometimes people need a strong shot of anti-religion to help pry their brains loose from captivity.

And some are like Neil, and would rather be one of those bastards making a strong cathartic reaction necessary. What a feeble excuse for a person, and what an illuminating examination of his background. 

Here’s a link.

Review: Wire Mother by Isabel J. Kim

Winner winner chicken dinner. 

Cassie lives in a world which is 2/3 digital people. She is afflicted with “Emotional Contagion Disorder … a condition with no ascribed cause, but scientists suspect that it has something to do with mirror neurons. Autism adjacent. The brain generating a reverse pareidolia, in that Cassie keeps abstracting noise from the meaning. Like most neurodivergences, it was only diagnosed when the condition became aggravating to those around her, which, in Cassie’s case, was when she stopped listening to her mother and began saying that she wasn’t real.”

Cassie’s mom is real, but she’s digital, because her dad likes HD RealDoll action more than the analog kind, and Cassie is a moody adolescent. She has a creepy boyfriend who torments small AIs, and apologizes for confusing her with a sex bot when she gets angry after he gets handsy.  She’s Judy Jetson but fucked up, and I adore her and would totally go see the movie made about this. I am at least 75% compatible with this story. 

Isabel J. Kim is a delightful author, I recall reading her stories before and she already has a bunch of trophies under her belt. Which shouldn’t prevent her from earning more. 

Go read this one, it’s fun. 

Review: Six People to Revise You by J.R. Dawson

 A story about someone who is trans and desires to get “revised” which is some kind of medical procedure where they get born again or memory wiped or body swapped or something, it wasn’t clear and I didn’t like the story enough to demand precise answers. Lots of memory flashbacks of romantic exchanges. I kept having to drag my attention back to it, although I am grateful that I finally got around to ordering those office chair arm pads. If this story was playing on my mental mixing board I’d probably turn the faders way down for past anecdotes and way up for “how exactly does this revision science or technology or whatever it is work?” I’m only 22% compatible with this story because the medical framing at the beginning and end seemed realistic but the rest didn’t register very hard. 

One link to inform you, or entertain you, or something. 

Review: “Missing Helen” by Tia Tashiro

 Hmm, a story about a clone … so there’s this relationship between a woman who donated her DNA when she was a broke kid and a scoundrel, and they break up, then the scoundrel gets on Future Tinder to find a new girlfriend, and it matches him with her clone. 

“The app informed him that they were ninety-seven percent compatible.”

 This story is a cop-out, a cock-tease, a rip-off, for not elaborating further about this miraculous compatibility app. Is it like the one in The Sims that balances personalities and interests? Does it work off of astrology, or palmistry, or do you have to fill out a questionnaire with at least 100 questions (in order to achieve a score of 97%)? Or is the compatibility estimate based on biology? Like the implied GSA happening toward the end of the story (don’t google that until you finish reading it, it’s a spoiler)? Does one have better than 97% compatibility with one’s clone? Will we someday just go around in echo chambers made up of our own clones?

The story never answers these questions. It just kind of flops around ideas like “my clone is me, but without the baggage!” And kind of implies that of course men would want to keep trading in their current wife for a younger model of the same person. Or maybe they’re just trying to hit 98% and beat their high score. I was only about 57% compatible with this story but that still exceeds the 42% for the alternate timelines one while not surpassing the 64% I’ll score for the super-abled one. People whose compatibility score is 30% or less with me may have different opinions but it’s not like I’m going to have to spend any time listening to them go on about it. 

Test your compatibility score with this story here. 

Sinners versus K-Pop Demon Hunters

I understand there are other movies nominated for a Hugo, but don't really care. These are the ones I saw. While some people judge movies by the costumes and set design, or sometimes even the actors and script. I put a huge amount of judgmental weight on their soundtracks. 

I have an everyday music playlist that I play whenever I’m on the clock, to remind me of that. Periodically I throw different albums into the mix, and retire songs whenever I get tired of them. And although lots of Sinners songs held their own for months, notably Pale Pale Moon and a nice although historically inaccurate cover of Wang Dang Doodle,

 (I still like the Pointer Sisters version best, although I also like soundtrack version, and the Grateful Dead version, and the original Howlin’ Wolf version -- Fast-Talking Fanny and their gang made their way into a classic American song that people will still be covering in a hundred years)

to my ears, the KDH soundtrack seems fresh every time. Golden actually came on while I was starting to type this, and I was humming along.

I’m going to share something that links these two movies: alink to a PBS documentary called Pu’uwai Haokila: The Story of How Hawai’iShaped Modern Music.

 It talks about a small kingdom, unfairly overthrown by a larger oppresor. The rest of the world didn’t seem to care. So a pack of shamans, armed only with their music, began traveling the world to gather reconaisance and gather allies, and do whatever they could to try and set it right. One of their entry points was the World’s Fair – specifically the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition, where they delivered an exciting style of playing guitar that, well, shaped modern music. Like the documentary says. And it was the crucial foundational ingredient in everything from the steel guitars of old timey country to the slide guitars of the delta blues.

To my poetic mind, pop-rock-soul-country-all the music that moves me all stems from that moment where Black, European, and Polynesian forces united their musical traditions – with more than significant contribution by Native Americans with relation to rhythms and harmonies -- and lit this cosmic spark, initiated by the urgency of a squad of bards from a small and desparate kingdom amalgamating all the music they encountered in their travels. 

Check out the history of that awesome resonator guitar that figures in a crucial scene of Sinners, or read about Joseph Kekuku if you want to know more. I had an amazing time last weekend watching Hawaiian guitar legends George Kahumoko, Jr. and Kimo West talk about Joseph, and play music on a 1930s Rickenbacker lap steel that would have sounded very familiar to all the people in Sinners. They heard it on the radio all the time.

Sinners speaks to different ideas about the music sparking from the collision of Black and European traditions. The scene where people in a nightclub are listening to a guitar solo – and suddenly they are flashing into the future to see Jimi Hendrix, and more – is one of the most Real-With-A-Capital-R scenes I have ever seen in a movie. But I’m about music the way Stephen King is about baseball, or the way Quentin Tarentino is about feet. 

And Zoroastrian themes about good and evil fit perfectly well within vampire stories and the whole Southern gothic dynamic, and they’re all over K-Pop Demon Hunters too. I would’ve liked Sinners a lot better, though, if those Indigenous vampire hunters at the beginning had been singing one of their own songs, and if the Chinese-American couple had been listening to some steel guitar, and if the Hendrix apparition had been sanctified by one of his ghostly Cherokee ancestors.

Now I’m going to cut to the shamans of K-Pop Demon Hunters, who descend from a long tradition of musical aggregators. Jinu was busking on a bipa – an ancient Korean-style stringed guitar-like thing – centuries ago, and the female trios preceding Huntrix perform in whatever style is contemporary. Lots of those catchy melodies on the sountrack are lifted from European classical music (infringement proof, lol) with a heavy sprinkling of Black styles from Motown to Hip Hop, all rendered in what has evolved into the ”Korean Pop sound” – multilayered production, crisp beats, influences not so much drawn from culture as from pop culture, swiping the best elements from multiple styles.

What Sinners and KPDH have in common is the idea that music can fight evil. That evil is a very real and dangerous thing, but music can turn it back to hell, where it belongs. I can get behind that.

What shifts me toward voting for KPDH is the idea that I grew up in the South Pacific, listening to Asian music alongside all the other kinds. Asian musicians have been shut out of the American pop industry even though a Pacific Islander was kind enough to invent guitar solos for us. One of the characters in my courtroom-drama-work-in-progress is an Asian-American musician who had to go to South Korea in order to have a music career; he’s based on real life examples, notably Mark Lee, a Canadian of Korean descent who started out in boy band known as NCT and recently put out a terrific solo album called Firstfruit that got attention from Rolling Stone.

I’m a big fan of K-Pop (my favorites include SHINee, BTS, Stray Kids, Ateez, EXO, MonstaX and on and on) because it got me through the pandemic. My music computer died a month after lockdown began so I just embraced a new genre while re-uploading everything, and then I started expecting the kind of HD surround which only K-Pop can deliver.

And I’m also a big fan of this movie. I’ve mostly given up on movies. I sat through the Oscar noms year before last and it was all movies that I never want to see again, and this was the first year I haven’t bothered to see any of the best picture nominees.

But somehow I found this cartoon musical enchanting enough for multiple plays. It’s a story about a romance between a mostly-good girl and a mostly-bad boy, and the female characters are absolutely unafraid. Whether it’s fighting demons, looking gross during an eating scene or delivering moving songs about disclosure such as This Is What It Sounds Like, these girls are central.

This is a female-gaze movie for girls, about girls. I was recently chatting about how in South Korea, it’s perfectly okay for boys to enjoy watching cute girls sing, and there are quite a few examples in the movie of the diversity among music fans. In America, female-gaze is still taboo, and it’s assumed no boys would be interested in watching cute girls sing – too unmacho. Our media is centered on attracting to the young male demographic that has enough disposable money to go to the movies these days, and I’m really hoping the success of KPDH might sway things just a tad, especially since the soundtrack has been defeating all contenders in the music charts for the past year and is currently holding its own alongside the new BTS album on the K-Pop charts.

That’s a lot of demons banished back to hell. 

I don't think it'll win; the Hugo crowd probably prefers tapping their toes to Wang Dang Doodle as opposed to this newfangled stuff their grandkids keep singing. KPDH mostly slid under the radar of the prior generation. There wasn't even any merch available for the longest time, and we had to rely on fanmade stuff.  It's still my favorite though, and I kind of want to skip the ceremony so I won't get disappointed when it gets passed up for someone else's comfort film. 

Review: “Laser Eyes Ain’t Everything” by Effie Seiberg

This is an Important Message Story about disability, in which people also have super-abilities to which society must adjust. The narrator of the tale has laser eyes that can burn stuff but they are also in a wheelchair and require ramps. 

I like this story because to me, it seems like what science fiction stories should be: a slice of alternate reality that makes us think about the way things are, and the way they might possibly be. I’m comparing it favorably to the first story, which used alternate-universe switching and leaned heavily on emotional buttons – both things that don’t necessarily move me.

The issue of disability does move me; I have a slew of disabled friends and this year I actually entered the Island of Malfunctioning Toys myself, with an arthritic neck condition that limits the amount and type of fun I can have. And will preclude me from going on any roller-coaster-resembling attractions at the Disney parks. Goddammit. 

Our world often does a piss poor job handling disability – and at the same time, as the story points out, sometimes our world fawns excessively upon the super-abled. The pretty, the athletic, the ones like me that have freaky brains that adjust well to screens and text.

I’ve always known I had a freaky brain. I was a bright kid who picked up reading early, to me it was as easy as breathing. As people began writing more about neurodivergence, plenty of that resonated too. These days the only label I use is “gifted” since I’ve never been diagnosed with anything else. The experts consider gifted to be yet another form of neurodivergence, or a way in which people can have a brain that differs significantly from the average/normal. For me it’s always been more of a situation of being super-abled than disabled. I ace tests and pick up new skills fast. 

Lots of people aligned with the political faction currently in power have an unhealthy fascination for the gifted, and go around declaring that people who would probably run circles around them are “low IQ” despite a complete lack of evidence. To those types of people, I have one thing to say: livestreamed head-to-head IQ tests where I handicap myself by smoking a doobie first to give you a fighting chance or GFTO. IQ worshippers are usually firmly in the average percentile, fantasizing about the glamorous lifestyles we poindexters supposedly enjoy. Actual gifted folks are kind of like, well, the science fiction crowd. A wide array of skills and abiliities, including lots who are both disabled and super-abled at the same time. 

And even though a lot of aspiring types are out there eating superfoods and taking their supplements which they claim will elevate their cognitive skills into the lofty realms of people who check out multiple library books at the same time, they're not exactly appearing in the ranks of inventors and professors and authors (especially the kind who write convoluted overthinky material such as science fiction). Not even at the L. Ron Hubbard level. 

It's one of those situations where the people who envy it the most are least likely to have any direct experience. Although if they wanted to get direct experience, as well as witness the wide range of socioeconomic, educational, and charisma score variation found among people who dig discussing overthinky nerd shit, they could just go to Worldcon. And maybe learn something. 

Occasionally the gifted are too fractious to deal with as well (see Exhibit A, me), and sometimes with massive deficits to balance out the gifts, which is the main theme of this story about how you can have super powers that make part of your life easy while still struggling with different aspects. I usually don’t go for message stories but this one is exceptionally good, and so far it’s my favorite, so I’ll be voting for it unless one of the next three changes my mind. 

Check it out here.