Ruby Jades Diary: The End

Did you know that if you attach a message to a journal with a certain tag, it locks that entry to the journal and you can’t delete it without deleting the entire journal?  Well, I didn’t.  I’m sure you can figure out why I’m mentioning that.

Anyway, I couldn’t put it off any longer.  I had to go and face the Council and find out what they wanted from me now.  I was guessing that they probably had some other annoying task for me to do, but I had to admit that they’d finally paid attention to what I’d been doing this past while and were going to reprimand me for not actually acting like a Jedi should.

Instead, they wanted me to take Master’s Syo spot on the Jedi Council.

My first reaction was that I didn’t want to get stuck in boring meetings in a boring planet like Tython.  Okay, that’s not true.  My first reaction was “Have you been playing attention?!?  I’m not a nice person!“.  But the reaction that I actually said out loud was the first one I mentioned.  Which really should have given them my first reaction.  But then they’d said that I’d shown admirable Jedi qualities, including diplomacy and patience.  Yeah, they don’t me too well, do they?

But they said that things had changed and so Jedi Council members wouldn’t be forced to sit around on Tython debating all of the little annoying things that made up the issues that they normally had to deal with.  So let me get this straight:  I’ll get all the prestige of being a Jedi Council member, I’ll get the authority of being a Jedi Council member, but I can take off whenever I want and dodge all the annoying obligations of it, and in fact I don’t even have to be on Tython at all?  I’m dreaming, right?  This had to be a dream.

Anyway, it wasn’t a dream and I grudgingly accepted their terms that give me everything I could have possibly wanted when I joined the Jedi Order.

There’s one last thing to resolve.  See, “Uncle Koerran” was interested in me because he had a vision that I would be doing things that would bring me into contact with the Children of the Emperor, and he had an … interest in them.  Yeah, that implication is what you think it is.  The Jedi that he’s “mentoring” is also one that he’s, well, doing some rather private meditations with and she happened to be one.  She managed to shake it off, but she wanted to track down and convert some of the others back to the Light side.  Which almost makes me feel bad that I killed so many of them.  Including Master Syo.  But he said that what I did should make the Children easier to find and easier to convert, and that he didn’t think that I killed any of her personal friends, so she probably wasn’t going to be too offended.  If we ever met, though, he said that I probably shouldn’t bring it up.

Which was fine with me.  I don’t like to brag about my kills anyway.  Well, at least not too much.

And you know, I guess that’s why I’m pretty content being a Jedi instead of a Sith.  Yeah, as a Sith you get to work off a lot of your anger issues and use that to feed your power, but it seems like you also have to be an arrogant, overconfident ass, and while I resemble that remark it all comes down to this:  I’m not a nice person, but I’m not a complete jerk.  As a Jedi, I get to fight and even get to kill people, but I get to feel good about it after, pretty much no matter how I do it.  Evil and shady people almost line up to attack me, and I get to kill them in what pretty much always is self-defense.  That’s a much better life than I thought I’d have here.

But no, I haven’t forgiven her.  Wanna make something of it?

Broken Pieces Shine (Chapter 4)

So during the “commercial break”, the guys were hustled over to the comfy red sofa off to the side, their baggage was rearranged so that only the medium-sized bags were there, everyone’s makeup was touched up, and the audience waited more or less patiently for things to start up again.  Finally, everything was ready, the lights went back on, and Amanda stood over where she had stood before while Erica went over to the bags.

“Hello, and welcome back to ‘Baggage’!” she said cheerily.  “This is our Dealbreaker round, because at the end of this round one of the guys will be going home.  For that, we have their mixed bags here on stage.  They contain one thing about them that’s pretty good and one thing about them that’s … well, not so good.  The bags have been placed randomly so Amanda won’t know which bag belongs to which guy.  After seeing their good and bad baggage, Amanda will decide which bag she can’t live with and whichever guy claims that bag will be going home.  So let’s start the Dealbreaker round!”

The lights dimmed, dramatic music played, and then everything settled down again and focused on Erica again as she stood by the bag furthest to the right from Amanda’s perspective.  “Bag … number 1, ” Erica said, moving to reveal the good point from that bag.

“I have taken three startups to successful IPOs, ” Erica said.

Then she went to reveal the bad point from the bag.  “But … ” she said, “I’ve never had a relationship last longer than three months.”

Amanda winced a bit, but then found that she wasn’t all that surprised.  Heck, given that pretty much all of the guys that had dated her for longer than were just using her, that made him better than most of the guys she’d dated before.

Erica moved to the second bag, and to reveal the good point.  “I have university degrees in three unrelated fields, ” Erica said.

Then she moved to reveal the bad point.  “But … ” she said, “I am a confirmed and extreme introvert.”

After the audience had settled, Erica quipped, “Must be online degrees”.

The audience laughed at that, and Erica moved to the last bag, and to reveal the good point.  “I have copies of everything you’ve ever done, ” she said.

“But … ” she continued, “My mother must approve of all my relationships.”

After all of that was done, Erica walked over to Amanda.  “So, what are you thinking?  Let’s start with the first one, ” she said.

“Are you sure that you don’t have the good and bad points mixed up?” Amanda blurted out.

The audience laughed.  Amanda continued, “I mean, it’s nice that he’s attached to his mother, although he might be a bit too much of a Mama’s boy for me.”

“And what about the second one?” Erica asked.

“Well, that he has that many degrees certainly means he’s smart, ” Amanda said.  “But my career is all about socializing, and a guy that won’t socialize might be an issue.  Although I guess that he’d be able to help me escape from the heavy socializing when it got too much, which might be nice!”

“And the last one?” Erica asked.

“To build those companies shows that he’s ambitious, which I like, ” Amanda replied.  “But he sounds kinda like a ‘pump ‘n dump’ kinda guy, and I’m not interested in that.”

“Okay, now that you’ve said that, it’s time for you to choose.  Which of these bags is your dealbreaker, and remember that the guy who claims it will be going home, ” Erica said.

Amanda thought for a bit.  None of the bad baggage was all that bad, especially since she didn’t really want more than one date with any of them.  But the problem was with the good baggage.  Whomever it was who had everything she ever owned sounded like someone with a massive crush, and massive crushes led to disappointment, stalking and all sorts of other bad things.  Better to get rid of him before she had to spend an entire date with him fawning over her.

“My dealbreaker is … the guy who has everything I’ve ever done and has his mother approve his relationships, ” she said.

“All right, gentlemen, claim your bags!” Erica said.

The men got up and walked to the bags.  At first, they arranged themselves like they had originally:  Steve to the left, Alex in the middle, and Tony on the right.  Then, at a signal from the director, they shuffled around so that Alex was to the left, Tony was in the middle and Steve was on the right.  Which meant that Alex was the one who would be going home.

“So, Alex, anything you want to say?” Erica said.

“Well, my mother can read people really well, and if she doesn’t like someone then they aren’t a good person, ” Alex said.  “But I’m sure she would have loved you.”

Amanda didn’t say anything.  It was probably best that he didn’t realize that it wasn’t the bad baggage that she was rejecting.

“So I’m sorry Alex but it’s time for you to pack up and go, ” Erica said.

Alex closed the lid on the case.  He couldn’t keep the bitterness from his voice when he said “Good luck with these two.  You’re going to need it.”  And then he walked off the stage.

“Anyway, so we have Tony left who is an extreme and committed introvert, and Steve who has never had a relationship last more than three months.  We’re going to give Amanda a chance to get to know the two of you better, so come and join us on the Hotseat!” Erica said.

Hermeneutic Labour

So I recently came across this article coining a new term called “Hermaneutic Labour” and arguing that women are burdened more by it than men are.  This is a term akin to “emotional labour”, which the article loosely defines thusly:

Anderson’s theory ties in nicely to a more well-known concept: emotional labor, the idea that the effort of managing nearly everything at home ― especially the seemingly invisible jobs no one in your family acknowledges (making dentist appointments, managing temper tantrums) ― often falls on women’s shoulders. As outlined by sociologist Arlie Hochschild, emotional labor also involves having to suppress any negative emotions you might have around such thankless work.

“Emotional labor is the nurse suppressing her frustration toward a difficult patient and presenting a warm attitude of care,” Anderson said. “Hermeneutic labor is this same nurse considering, on her drive home, whether or not that way of interacting with the patient was the right one.”

On the one hand, that women might do more managing of the emotions of people around them is not unreasonable, especially since for women they were the ones who were encouraged to be in touch with emotions while men were the ones who were expected to teach people how to suppress their emotions and to not let them get in the way.  And yet a nagging doubt raises its ugly head here, because while women complain about having to manage the emotions of people around them, men have always been encouraged to suppress and hide their emotions to avoid worrying other people.  It’s long been a defining trait of men that when things are going poorly such as when they have or might lose their job that they are expected to hide their feelings of concern and maintain that everything is going to be fine … and to do whatever it takes to make that be the case.  So on the one hand, women might well need to do a lot of labour to bring those emotions out or manage them so that they don’t cause negative consequences, but only because men were encouraged to try to suppress them so that women didn’t have to care about them.  A lot of the theory of emotional labour can be seen as being from the perspective of women and ignoring what men themselves might be doing that’s similar.

I think the same thing might be happening here, only more so, because it looks to me like a lot of this hermeneutic labour are things that men have been dealing with for ages.  Her initial comment:

As Ellie Anderson approached 30, she started thinking about all the time she and her friends had wasted poring over conversations and texts they’d received from men they’d dated: Was that stray “K” over text cause for alarm? How long should you wait to say you had a great time on a date and want to do it again soon without coming on too strong?

“These conversations generally happened when one of us started dating a new guy. A lot of the time, we’d try to guess at what a guy wanted and how to avoid ‘freaking him out,’” said Anderson, an assistant professor of philosophy at Pomona College in Claremont, California.

Of course, the early days of a relationship are often a period of uncertainty. Still, it seemed to Anderson that the uncertainty usually worked in men’s favor. Meanwhile, it forced women to spend a lot of time trying to guess at men’s feelings because the men themselves were unwilling or unable to fully express themselves.

See, when it comes to dating, for the longest time men were forced to deal with this sort of thing.  There was lots of advice being given to men to ensure that they didn’t respond too quickly and look too desperate for fear of scaring her off, but also not to wait too long because then she might feel disparaged and like she wasn’t important or interesting enough and so get angry at the man for waiting too long.  And of course there’s the common story of a woman who gets angry at her partner for some reason but when he asks what is bothering her simply replies with “Well, if you don’t know …”.  Men have been always had to guess at women’s feelings because women — either by social necessity or by nature — have not always been forthcoming with what they are feeling.  Men are expected to ask a woman out of they are interested, while women rely on flirting and get upset when the man they like doesn’t discern their feelings from the deliberately vague signals that they were dropping (to give them the social out of that ambiguity).  At the same time, men were encouraged to not be too direct in their interest, especially if it had a sexual aspect to it.  That dating could be described as a dating game was not because men wanted it that way.

Ellie Anderson also links it to women’s intuition in an odd way:

What we call “women’s intuition,” Anderson said, is actually a hard-won achievement that takes years to produce and sustain.

“It’s a euphemism for hermeneutic labor,” she said. “We tend to deny the substantial amounts of work that women do to maintain relationships, as well as the fact that a lot of this work is cognitive in character.”

Except, women’s intuition was called that because it was, well, intuitive.  Women themselves didn’t think that it was cognitive, and couldn’t point back to anything that they had done to learn it.  Now, Anderson may have a point here that they can pick up on some of that from learning to manage relationships, but on the other hand the reason they tend to manage relationships more often and better might be because they had an innate faculty for it.  But it was never cognitive in the sense of being reasoned out or built out of logical assessments.

At any rate, while on the one hand Anderson might be missing how men tended to do that more often and now she’s facing the same thing, on the other hand some of it might be more a reflection of the insecurities of women and their seeing ambiguity and a lack of communication where none exists.  As we saw in the above quote, Anderson is wondering what a stray “K” in a text might mean … when, in reality, it might well just mean “K”.  And this follows on in this quote:

Akua K. Boateng, a psychotherapist in private practice in south Philadelphia, sees hermeneutic labor as a rite of passage for young women, especially in the text-centric online dating era. Generally speaking, women often let men take the lead in such communication.

“If he is texting, she is texting ― even if she might desire to talk by phone ― while talking with her friends about what the frequency or tone of his texts might mean about his true intentions,” Boateng said.

First, women are letting men take the lead, which is putting the labour on them instead of taking it themselves.  But more relevantly here, he is texting and she and a bunch of her friends are dissecting them to try to figure out what he really means by them, never considering that maybe, just maybe, all he means by it is exactly what he said.  No language lacks ambiguity sufficiently to survive being dissected at that level, and the short form of texts certainly can’t survive that.  Thus, perhaps he’s expressing things directly and clearly and it’s only this sort of dissection that is causing the doubts to be raised.  To then turn around and blame the man for making her do work and not communicating properly only because she’s finding ambiguity where none exists is obviously not at all a fair assessment.

And ultimately, that is my — admittedly shallow — opinion of hermaneutic labour.  It’s not fair to say that this is something that women do more often than men because for the most part it’s women complaining about having to do things that men have always had to do, complaining that men aren’t being totally clear in their communications when historically they haven’t been all that clear, and calling men out for being ambiguous in their communication only because they dissect those communications so much that they cannot help but find ambiguities in it.  And all of this is ultimately in service of them feeling that they have it hard and that any issues that arise because of this are failings in the men, not in them.  Yes, some men can be bad at communicating … but then so can some women.  Yes, if people aren’t communicating well then something might have to be done about that, but communication is a two-way street and so the issue might be on the side of the receiver, not the sender … and sometimes these sorts of issues aren’t about someone doing it “wrong”, but instead that the two people don’t communicate in the same way and so it takes more effort for them to understand that.  Creating a philosophical category of “hermaneutic labour” and trying to massage it to cover the things Anderson doesn’t like is the wrong approach here.

Thoughts on “Beyond the Door”

I didn’t realize that this was an Italian movie until I started watching it.  If I had known that, I might have skipped it, because I haven’t had a lot of luck with Italian movies, with them in general being “Meh” at best.

The idea is an interesting one, but the plot is a bit botched.  It starts with some evil entity talking to the audience about how they are really responsible for the movie, and then moves on to someone who seems to be a servant of the first entity, who has mostly failed and is about to die for that failure by driving his car off a cliff, but he gets a couple of weeks to ensure that a woman has the evil entity’s child.  We then switch to her, discovering that she’s pregnant even though she was using birth control.  The pregnancy proceeds at an astonishing rate, and the woman starts to act more strange and evil as it progresses, and moves from wanting an abortion to insisting on keeping the child in the course of one conversation.  The man from the beginning shows up and convinces the husband to let him try to help her, but he clearly doesn’t.  She seems to give birth and it looks like the baby might have died, but at least later a child — maybe one of her children from early on — develops glowing eyes indicating that he’s demonic, and is carrying a car that he flips over the side of the boat … a car that is a model of the car the man crashed in, and that man was killed due to the evil entity being capricious.

Why I say this movie botched the plot is that there are two decent ideas here, and they start with one, switch to the other, and then mostly drop both.  The idea of the man having to manipulate her into keeping the baby is a good one, but while he’s prominent in the opening he disappears for most of the movie.  So the idea of something similar to “Rosemary’s Baby” with the woman struggling to deal with a strange demonic pregnancy, but her personality quickly changes to a demonic one which cuts that off.  They could have had the husband’s attempts to deal with that be the focus, but he’s out of focus for most of it and doesn’t really do much.  So despite there being some good ideas that could have been turned into a serviceable plot, none of them are actually developed and so the movie seems to meander around the various ideas instead of developing one solid interesting plot.

Which then causes the movie to be completely boring.  There’s no consistent and solid plot to focus on, and again the plot meanders around through a bunch of ideas.  So that can’t hold your interest.  And the inconsistency in the woman’s personality means that we lose the ability to be interested in how she’s reacting to this.  The movie gives the kids personalities but shuffles them out of the way before any of that can be interesting, and so we don’t get to see the kids reacting to things either.  The husband and her doctor and the other characters are all minor and not developed.  Even the man at the beginning gets nothing other than a short appearance to finish things off and to be betrayed by the evil entity.  And as the evil entity says at the beginning the evil entity doesn’t really get much focus and doesn’t really do or say much.  Bluntly, not much is happening and what minor scares it has — some of which are effective — can’t save the fact that most of the movie is as dull as it can be.

Since this movie is so boring, I have no interest in watching it again.  There are some decent ideas here, but none of them are developed and because of that there’s nothing to hold my interest.

Everybody has a Backlog: What is a backlog, anyway?

So, I was reading around my normal haunts and came across this post by Siggy which linked to this video.  The topic?  Backlogs and, specifically, backlogs of video games.  And both cast the idea of backlogs in a negative light, and both attempted to claim that they themselves don’t have backlogs and think that most people shouldn’t have them either.  Since I think most people would agree that I can be said to indeed adopt backlogs, I decided that I’d make some posts defending the basic idea that they reject:  Everybody has a backlog.

Since the video is, well, a video.  I won’t quoting much from it directly, and since it’s a long video I’m not going to be rewatching it to get specific comments either, instead relying on my own memory of it.  So I invite people to watch it and correct the things that I get completely wrong, should I do that.  I’m going to get a few posts out of this, starting with this one that focuses on what a backlog is and why everybody can be said to have one, before moving on to the video’s attempts to replace the backlog and finally to Siggy’s notion about how his list doesn’t count as a backlog.

So, from the video, the concern they have about backlogs is that it looks like backlogs can indeed be serious business.  They talk about people having detailed spreadsheets tracking all of this, using How Long to Beat to calculate times, referencing lots and lots of videos talking about ways to get through that backlog, and in general doing an awful lot of things that make having a backlog seem like a chore rather than something someone is supposed to be doing for fun.  But as part of that, they end up trying to get a basic definition of a backlog, which boils down to “a list of games to play”, which Siggy disagrees with.  But more on that later.

Because that’s more or less the definition of a backlog.  In its most basic form, a backlog is a bunch of games that someone knows that they want to play but due to either a lack of time or a lack of resources or some other reason they can’t play or finish right now.  As the video references stacks, this was how it all started in the old days (of the Centauri Republic?) when people had to actually buy physical games.  People would go on their occasional trips to buy physical games, but still didn’t have the time to play all of them.  But they had to store them somehow, so they ended up as stacks.  And as that stack grew people would get the first pangs knowing that the stacks were getting larger and larger and they thus weren’t making a dent in that stack of games that they had decided that they wanted to play — or else they wouldn’t have bought them — but for various reasons hadn’t been able to get around to playing yet.

Which led, then, to what is the defining trait of the modern backlog:  organization.  Just to avoid the stacks following over, they needed to be organized in some way.  And since people were indeed actually playing games from the stack, there would be a temptation to organize it to make finding the next game to play easier, from stacking them in alphabetical order to stacking them in a priority order where the games someone most wanted to play would be on top and the games someone least wanted to play — but still wanted to play — would be on the bottom.  And from this, we can note that having stacks lying around can be hazardous if they get too big, so that might involve sorting them into boxes and the like.  And then some enterprising gamers might decide that something like a spreadsheet would work out better, and use that.  But ultimately once these stacks or lists get too big there soon comes a desire to organize it in some way to make handling it easier.

Now that we can get more games digitally rather than as physical boxes, this only becomes more important because digital video games are notoriously hard to stack.  But then the nature of digital video games also does a lot of that work for us.  People who play on Steam have their Steam lists.  People on GOG can look at their collection and sort it in certain ways.  So we have some of that organization built in once we start to go digital.

Except … that’s not really sufficient.  First of all, it doesn’t encompass all of our games.  We are going to have a mix of physical and digital games, even as the former might start to diminish in number as we go along.  But even for digital games most people will have things on Steam and on GOG and on a host of other places.  The lists a particular service provides obviously doesn’t cover the games on the other services.  Moreover, it’s not all that easy to sort these lists by priority, meaning by the games that you would prefer to play.  You might be able to sneak in some things like time to play and the like that would let you figure that you, but that’s not the same thing as, say, having that new Mass Effect game on the top of the stack to grab and play when you’re ready.

And as noted above, knowing how long a game will take to play is an important factor as well.  After all, if the spouse and kids are going to be away for a weekend or even a week, you kinda need to know how long the game you’re going to pick up in the spare time you suddenly have so that you can feel confident that you’ll finish it in time.  Or, more relevantly for me, if you plan on playing a game in your vacation time you need to know how long it will take to finish that game so that you can plan your time blocks accordingly.

So the desire for organization is what pushes things towards the intensely detailed spreadsheets that are cropping up more and more often.  These things need to be organized, and some people need or want more organization or more information than others.  As you can see from my lists, I don’t need that much stuff formally attached to my lists because I tend to “go with my gut” and lean towards what I think I feel like playing and what might be cool and assembling any information I need to work that out later.  But ultimately the key driver here is a desire to organize these things into some way as to maximize your fun playing them.

But then, why do so many people seem to go overboard on the organizational aspects?  Why do so many people seem to find working through their backlogs as an obligation instead of something for fun, so much so that they have to reward themselves by playing another game once they finish one on the list?  Why do so many people seem to use these backlogs for social validation rather than as something that helps them just have fun playing games?

Well, we are all human beings, and human beings can sometimes turn the things they find fun into overly organized obligations.  We can lose sight of the forest for the trees, and forget that the reason these things started was because we found we had a lot of games that we wanted to play for fun and so let the obligation take over and make us not have fun anymore.  We can indeed find that we are playing games that we don’t enjoy just so that we can claim to have finished it instead of moving on to a game that we might have fun with.  We can get some social responses from our list and so feel some pressure to play something because we know other people want us to play it (I get that feeling from people who have commented in my playing things like Ultima or the Gold Box Games.  Fortunately, I know that trying to force myself to play something in those cases never works and so can resist that temptation).  So, yes, ultimately, we can corrupt our backlog so that it no longer serves the purpose that it originally had and serves another purpose that might not make us as happy as if we had kept it serving that original purpose.

But, ultimately, why I say that everyone has a backlog is that if you are any kind of gamer and have to do anything other than simply playing games all day and have all the money you need to get any game you want, you are going to end up with games that you want to play but haven’t played yet and might not play for a while.  How formal your backlog is would be up to you, but a backlog in its most basic form is that gap between what you want to play and what you have the resources to finish before coming across something else you want to play.  Unless you hop from game to game like I hop between Wizardry 8 parties, abandoning one when the next one catches your eye, you will have a backlog.  And that model of game-hopping doesn’t seem like it would be an improvement over the more formalized and organized backlogs that can end up being corrupted into the exact opposite of what they were supposed to be.

So, yeah, everyone has a backlog.  How organized it is and how bad you feel about not clearing it will vary from person to person, and those things will determine if it feels more like an obligation than a tool for having fun playing games.  But the negatives of the extreme end of the backlog model doesn’t mean that you don’t have a backlog if you don’t go that far.

But maybe there are alternatives.  I’ll look at the alternative in the video in the next post, although, spoiler alert, I don’t think it works as an alternative because it doesn’t fulfill the purpose of most backlogs.

Thoughts on “Clueless”

They say “Necessity is the mother of invention”.  I think that I can also add “Necessity is the father of motivation”, because once it comes down to the point where you pretty much have to do something or else you will have what you consider to be unacceptably negative consequences — being out of clothes meaning that you need to do laundry, the grass getting so thick that if you leave it any longer you won’t be able to cut it with anything less than a scythe, and so on — then you suddenly get the motivation to do it that you had been lacking for far, far too long.

This post only exists because of that sort of thing.  As I’ve commented a number of times in the past, I have a large stack of movies to watch that I picked up at various times from Walmart, especially during the pandemic when the lack of other things to do made watching movies at home interesting and so all sorts of cheap packs were made available.  It’s also the case, however, that movies are not an easy thing for me to watch, especially if I want to comment on it.  They don’t fit neatly into my scheduled viewing time and I always want to do other things more than watch movies.  So I never get around to watching them.

However, I was planning out what posts to write and noticed that I was lacking post ideas for my Tuesday and Wednesday posting, which is where I usually do things like TV shows and movies and books and video games.  For books, I’ve been reading them in my spare time and in my laundry time, which means that it takes me longer to get through them than it used to, and so I don’t have stuff to talk about every week like I might have had in the past.  For video games, I haven’t had the time to play much other than “The Old Republic”, and you get that on Mondays (I have lots to talk about there).  For TV shows, after finishing off Classic Doctor Who I moved on to rewatching the modern version which I won’t have a lot to talk about (having talked about it already) and my Friday watching falls into both taking a long time to get through anything and also being preempted by other things, and I’ve already talked about my issues with watching movies.

So I was looking ahead to what I could write about, and discovered that I didn’t have that much to write about.  So I looked around and saw my stacks of movies and decided that I should probably watch some movies to kill in my backlog of things to talk about.  And of course I remembered other things that I wanted to talk about and other things have come up, since that is the way these things normally work.

Anyway, I decided to watch “Clueless” because it was in the same three movie pack that “Mean Girls” came in, but it’s also on one of my streaming services — the same one that had “Mean Girls” on it, naturally — and so I decided to watch it there.

In looking at the description, it said that it was a rework in some sense of the Jane Austin novel “Emma”, which I had read as part of reading some of her stuff and didn’t care that much for.  So I was interested in seeing how this remake worked.

One issue right off the bat with this movie is that unlike for “Mean Girls” I can’t really give a good summary of the movie itself.  It follows Cher, a rich girl who is the daughter of a lawyer who ends up matching two of her teachers in order to lighten one of them up enough to give her a better grade.  She then muses about actually doing good things and ends up settling on making over a new girl and getting her the right kind of boyfriend.  She also spars with her somewhat but not or not any longer stepbrother — he’s the son of her father’s ex-wife, but the father still treats him like a son — and they end up together after she chases after a couple of other guys, including one who is secretly gay.

The issue I had with Emma was that while I didn’t mind the story, I didn’t care for the lead character and so couldn’t really enjoy the work.  Here, that’s inverted.  Despite wondering if she was always selfish Cher, while being a bit shallow and clueless at times, is in general a nice person who treats people relatively well, with the exception of her perhaps rival who isn’t any nicer to her.  So I found myself feeling sympathetic towards her and liking her, which made watching her do these things much more entertaining.

However, the issue here is that it loses the tighter narrative of “Emma”.  In the book, Emma had just successfully set up someone which made her believe that she could do so again, and she gets the perfect candidate in her friend Harriet.  Here, Cher does not follow on from her successful matchmaking with a hankering to do it again and instead seems to be more focused on making over her new friend, with the dating being a secondary component to that.  In the book, Emma is trying to set up Harriet up with the higher status man because she thinks that Harriet is indeed herself higher status, and she makes Harriet reject her preferred beau only because of that status.  Here, the new friend Ty is attracted to a stoner, but seems to be a stoner herself, and when Cher makes the good point that hard drugs are bad and his life is a prime example of that we don’t feel like they really should be together and would be a good match like we did with Harriet, but instead that Ty should kick the drugs and find someone better.  While in the book Emma and the guy she ends up marrying spar, they spar over things as he keeps pointing out Emma’s foibles and she keeps going on anyway, only for them to turn out badly.  None of that exists between Cher and her beau, which makes them getting together at the end a predictable end to the work that lacks the idea that they are indeed well-matched because of her ideals and industry being reigned in by his common sense.

What this does it make the movie interesting to watch but a bit disconnected.  For example, at one point Cher — a terrible driver — is trying to get her driver’s license and fails miserably, and her beau makes a comment that she has finally hit a spot that she can’t talk her way out of, but that was such a minor part of the movie and her character that it loses the oomph it should have had.  All of these events and all of the subplots are all like this:  things that happen but things that happen for no real reason.  Silverstone’s performance and Cher’s character work to keep things interesting as we are at least somewhat interested in her, but the disconnected events make the work seem aimless and meandering at times.

Still, I found the movie moderately entertaining, mostly for the reasons I’ve given above.  Cher is nice enough that we are sympathetic towards her and some of her arguments, especially in the debates, are brilliant while seemingly being unfocused or irrelevant to the debate until she brings it all together.  Still, unlike “Mean Girls”, I don’t really have any interest in watching the movie again.  The plot is just too disconnected for me to bother experiencing it again.

NHL Playoff Predictions: Round 2

So I had a pretty good run in the first round, going 6 – 2.  But home ice advantage had an even better run, as only Winnipeg didn’t hold serve, so it went 7 – 1. 

The NHL also threw a bit of a joker in the deck for my predictions for this round.  See, I generally like to make my picks before the second round starts.  But last night, the NHL in its infinite wisdom had Carolina play the Rangers in the first game of round 2, while having game 7 between Vegas and Dallas after that game.  So I had a choice:  I could either wait until I knew what all the teams were going to be to make my choices, but would also know how that first game turned out, or else I could make the picks before that first game without knowing which team would advance to the second round.  Obviously, my choice was to wait, reasoning that it wouldn’t give me that big an advantage to know how one game turned out and that since this was just for fun anyway it wouldn’t really matter if I could be claimed to have technically “cheated”.

So, with no further ado, my picks!

Eastern Conference:

Carolina vs Rangers:  I could be just being obstinate here, deliberately picking against the team that has the advantage to prove that it didn’t influence my decision.  Or I could be reacting to the first game where a team that was on the road and had a bad goal go in still managed to almost win the game.  It’s also not like Carolina is really an underdog here given that I think a lot of the betting sites have them pegged to win the Cup.  Then again, that’s not a real objective probability.  It would be so very easy to pick against them given that Andersen is playing well now but has had a penchant for giving up bad goals, but they have a lot to prove and so will be motivated.  Let’s roll the dice on this one.

Boston vs Florida:  Boston struggled to get past a relatively weak and flawed Leafs team, and it is reasonable to argue that the only reason the series lasted that long was because of Boston’s flaws.  Florida doesn’t seem to have missed a beat from their deep run last year.  Boston has the goaltending but has shown that that might not save them, and Florida’s goaltending certainly seems up to the task.  Against the Leafs, Boston in theory had the advantage defensively, including goaltending.  They don’t have that here, so Florida will likely pull it out.

Western Conference:

Colorado vs Dallas:  While Winnipeg was a more flawed team than we knew, after a relatively shaky first game it looks like Colorado started firing on all cylinders, while Dallas had to fight their way past Vegas.  Colorado, then, is the team that ended their regular season in a position that does not reflect the ability of their team, and that should give them the advantage here.

Edmonton vs Vancouver:  It’s tough to choose against the team with the proven gamebreakers who have done that in the playoffs, but here I think that Vancouver, at least for now, is the better team as a team.  That counts for a lot in the playoffs.  So I think they pull it off here.

Summary:

Eastern Conference:

Carolina vs Rangers
Boston vs Florida

Western Conference:

Colorado vs Dallas
Edmonton vs Vancouver

Overall Record:  6 – 2
Home Ice Advantage Record:  7 – 1

Ruby Jades Diary: Broken Pieces Shine

So I picked up a bunch of people in my travels.  And as it turns out, they were pretty much all broken.  Which I guess fit, because I guess I was kinda broken too.  And I wouldn’t tell a certain someone this, but I was probably broken before that certain someone decided to brain a Hutt with her shoe.  Dealing with their problems probably kinda helped me deal with mine.

Zenith was the most obvious.  He’d had to fight through a long and draining war and watch his planet used as a battleground by people who were using it as a marker on their board of galactic domination and didn’t care about it other than that.  He had some hero worship of some guy who ended up having done some really, really shady things and then wanted to get into politics himself to, I dunno, make things better?  Of course, his first instinct was to act shady himself which made his disapproval a bit hypocritical, but what’s life without a little hypocrisy?  It’s done wonders for me!  So I helped him out a bit and stopped him from doing things that were more stupid than shady, and he managed to get what he wanted.  I think.  Anyway, he seemed happier and whined less, so that was all good for me!

Nadia got broken by her father dying, and wanted to be trained by me to fix that and honour him and probably to prevent other people having to go through that as well.  She also had to deal with his political legacy.  She’s a good kid, though.  I kinda liked her and like training her, and she seems to be coming along well.

I’m still not fond of Theran, but he ultimately found out that the big machine that he was making to impress some scientific bigwigs could be used to make Holiday better, but if he used it for her he couldn’t use it in the competition, but if he used it in the competition it would blow out and he couldn’t use it for her.  I encouraged him to use it for her … mostly because I liked her better than I liked him.  He did, and they both seem happy, so who am I to argue with the results?

That special forces guy still had some issues with his memory and what had been done with him, and I think it’s a real sign of how I’ve grown as a person that after all of this was over I didn’t just kick him off the ship.  I’m not sure what happened to him, but he seems stable at least and I think he deserves a chance to prove and decide who he really is.  And aren’t we all just looking for that chance?

And freaky lizard guy … freeeaky lizard guy.  He found out that the guy who wanted to rule all the freaky lizard guys was setting up other freaky lizard guys to be killed by the big hairy guys, and wasn’t sure what to do about it, but we settled on confronting him over it.  He threatened us, ignoring that I was there.  I killed him, and all of his followers then decided that he was completely wrong and we were right all along.  I encouraged freaky lizard guy to take over as leader but he didn’t want it.  Good for him!  Leadership of any group bigger than about five is just a pain in the ass anyway.

Hmmm.  Reading this over, maybe I’m not as fixed as I’d like.  I think I should hit the delete button on this one.

Jade, is that you?

1 – INT – TORI’S LIVING ROOM

Tori, Trina and Beck are standing/sitting on the sofa.  Jade, Cat and Andre are hanging out by the piano.

TORI
Is Alex coming?

BECK
No, he’s too busy.

Tori gives him a suspicious look.
BECK
No, he’s really too busy this time.

TORI (looking over at Jade and that group)
You know, Jade really traded up when she started dating him.

BECK
Hey, I’m right here!

TORI
All I meant was that Alex is so nice!

BECK
I’m still right here!

TORI
No, what I mean that is she went from really nice guy you to an even nicer guy in Alex!

BECK
Well, okay, I guess I can take that.  Alex really is a nice guy.

TORI
Yeah.

BECK
But I’m cooler than he is!

TORI (rolling her eyes)
Go get us some pink lemonade.

BECK
Have you ever seen a pink lemon?

TORI
Go!

Beck leaves.  As that conversation had been going on, in the background Cat has been trying to get Jade to kiss the stuffed giraffe she’s been carrying around.  Jade eventually gets frustrated and throws it away.  Cat looks like she’s about to cry, so Jade resignedly goes to get it and gives it back to her.  Cat tries to get Jade to kiss it again, so Jade comes over to them.
JADE
So what are you two talking about?

TORI
About how Alex is so nice and you’re … (she trails off)

JADE (annoyed)
And I’m what?

TORI
Well, how you’re …

TRINA
Not.

JADE
So, what, you think that Alex is too nice for me?

Tori and Trina look at each other for a minute.
TORI/TRINA
Yeah!

Jade looks taken aback at that for an instant.
JADE
Well … well I’ll have you know that Alex likes that I’m not a prissy little goodie two shoes nice girl!

TORI
Except when you’re being mean.

JADE
Well, okay, except when I’m being unnecessarily mean!

TRINA
That’s how it always starts!

JADE
How what always starts?

TRINA
Jade, Jade, Jade.  You poor girl, uneducated in the ways of boys.

JADE
If you don’t start explaining you’re going to get educated in the ways of my boot connecting with your face!

TRINA
It’s simple:  guys always like to date the bad, flawed girls that they think they can change.

TORI
I’m not sure that’s …

TRINA
Tori, who’s the older sister here?

TORI
You are, but …

TRINA
So I have more experience in the ways of the world than you do, and trust me I know these things.

JADE
And you think that Alex only dated me hoping he could fix me?

TRINA
Of course!  That’s what guys do.  It’s totally a Pygmalion thing:  find some girl he can make over into his perfect girl.  Change her personality, her interests, her looks …

JADE
Looks?

TRINA
Of course!  All guys have a type and they love to find a girl who they think will look good the way they like them and slowly make them over into that!

TORI
But Alex hasn’t asked you to change your look, has he?

JADE
Well, once, when he was taking me to …

TRINA
That’s so typical of guys.  He fits the pattern!

JADE
And what happens if they decide they can’t make that person over.

TRINA
Dumpsville!

TORI
Come on, Jade, you can’t think that Alex would do that.  If he’s dating you, you’re totally his type.

JADE
But he would never tell me what his type was!

TRINA
That’s probably because you don’t fit it.  He didn’t want to ruin things with you by making you think that you weren’t his type!

JADE
Guys do that?

TRINA
All the time.

TORI
Maybe you shouldn’t take the dating advice of someone who hasn’t had a date in six months when you have a steady, loyal and committed boyfriend.

TRINA
Hey, I’m scoping out the options!

TORI
Anyway, I’m sure that you’re his type!

JADE (distracted)
Yeah, sure.

2 – INT – HOLLYWOOD ARTS HIGH – BY ALEX’S LOCKER

Alex is getting his books out of his locker.  Jade comes up to him.  She is dressed exactly like Tori does, and her hair is done up to look like hers as well.

JADE (using the Southern belle voice she uses to imitate Tori)
Well, hi there sweetums!

ALEX (taken aback by her outfit and accent)
Uh, hi?

JADE
After school, do you want to go and get an ice cream sundae?

ALEX
Uh, I don’t really think I have the time.

JADE
Well, if you’re too busy, why don’t I make you a nice blueberry pie to fortify you right up while you study?

ALEX
Uh, I remember the last time you tried, and …

JADE
Oh, come on pumpkin!  I’ll make it shine this time, I promise!

ALEX
I’m not sure that a pie should shine …

JADE
I just want to spend some time with my honey bunch!

ALEX
Yeah, but … I have practice today and … uh, have to go.  See you later.

He leaves.  Jade watches him go with a look of puzzled frustration on her face.

3 – INT – HOLLYWOOD ARTS HIGH – BY TORI’S LOCKER

Tori is taking her books out of her locker when Alex comes up to her.

ALEX
You weren’t trying to play a prank on me again, were you?

TORI
Oh, no.  I learned the hard way to never do that!

ALEX
Huh.

TORI
Why?  What happened?

ALEX
Well, Jade wasn’t acting like herself yesterday.

TORI
How was she acting?

ALEX
Well … kinda like you.

TORI
Like me?

ALEX
Yeah.  Well, the super sweet version of you, anyway.

TORI
I’m always super sweet!

ALEX
Anyway, it was just a bit … weird …

He trails off as he sees Jade approaching.  She’s dressed like Trina this time.
JADE
Hey, Alex. take me to the mall!

TORI
Jade?!?

JADE
Congratulations!  You have eyes!  Now, Alex, let’s go to the mall!

ALEX
Uh, why do you want to go to the mall?

JADE
Because there’s a sale on these cool new outfits and I want to get them.

She then sidles up to him sensuously.
JADE
And if you’re a good boy maybe I’ll model them all for you!

Alex looks nonplussed and puzzled for a moment.
ALEX
I have to go.  I have a thing.  Well, four things.  Well, four things and a giraffe.

He leaves.  Jade looks after him, puzzled and frustrated.
TORI
Jade, what are …

JADE (turning to her and waving a finger in her face)
Not.  One.  Word.

She leaves.  Tori watches her go, puzzled.

4 – INT – HALLWAY BY TORI’S LOCKER

Alex peeks around the corner at Jade’s locker, doesn’t see her, and sighs.  Then Jade comes out from the janitor’s closet.  She’s dressed as Cat this time, even to having red hair.

JADE
Hi!

ALEX
Uh, Jade?

JADE
Yeah!  I’m so looking forward to seeing the puppets at the park!  Wanna come?

ALEX
Isn’t it raining?

JADE
Well, my brother let me his umbrella … but it doesn’t open.

Alex just stops and looks at her, puzzlement being replaced by anger.
JADE (holding out a stuffed giraffe that she brought with her)
Wanna kiss my giraffe?

ALEX
What is wrong with you?

JADE
What’s that supposed to mean?

ALEX
Why in the world are you dressing up like my ex-girlfriend?  What are you trying to prove?

JADE (her imitation slipping)
What do you mean “What am I trying to prove”?

ALEX (frustrated)
How … ?  What … ? Oh, forget it!  I’m outta here!

He starts to walk away.  Jade looks shocked for an instant and then looks angry.
JADE
Hey, don’t walk away!  I’m doing this for you!

ALEX (stopping and turning back to face her)
What do you mean “You’re doing this for me!”?!?

JADE
I’m doing this because I like you!

ALEX
You’re dressing up like other girls because you like me?

JADE
Yes!

ALEX
Why in the world would you do that?

JADE
Because I want you to like me!

ALEX
And you think that somehow acting more like my ex that I broke up and, even worse, Trina instead of yourself will make me like you more?

JADE
Yes!

ALEX
I don’t … I can’t even … That makes no sense!

JADE
You would never tell me what your type was, and so I figured that it was probably one of them, but when you didn’t like me as Tori I figured you wanted the fashion plate, and when that didn’t work I had to go with the one type that I knew you liked.

ALEX
But … why couldn’t you believe that you were my type?

JADE
Because guys always want to change the girls they date into their type!

ALEX
Who told you that?

JADE
Trina!

ALEX
And why would you think that Trina saying it meant it was true?

JADE
Well … you did ask me to tone down my outfit when I met your parents!

ALEX
Because I wanted them to like you and figured that it’d be best not to overdo the goth look on the first meeting!  And it worked!

JADE
Well …

ALEX
And even then it was just “tone it down” not “change it entirely”!

JADE
But …

ALEX
So you were going to change yourself completely just to try to get me to like you more?  I might like you better if we slept together, so would you do that, too?

JADE (shocked)
You want to …

ALEX
No!

Jade stops, interrupted by his loud NO!
ALEX
We are not going there.

Alex pauses for an instant.

ALEX
Look, I like you.  And I’m trying to get to know you, and I hope you’re trying to get to know me.  And I hope that when we get to know each other we’ll be more than each other’s type.  But I can’t do that if you’re trying to guess at what my type is and trying to act that way.

JADE
But … won’t that make you like me?

ALEX
Well, what if you get it wrong?  If you act like someone you’re not and someone I don’t like, then we’ll break up when if you had just been yourself maybe it would have worked!

JADE
Well …

ALEX
And even so, what if you get it right?  Are you going to act that way for the rest of your life?

JADE
Well … I could …

ALEX
No, that would make you miserable, and that would ruin things, too.

JADE
But you’re already trying to change me!  You’re trying to make me less mean!

ALEX
Because I think you can be more than you are!  But if you really, really want to be mean, then be mean!  And we’ll see if we can work with that!

JADE
I … I think I can let the meanness slide.

ALEX
Anyway, I don’t want you to change who you are in the hopes of impressing me or making me feel good!  Be yourself!  Be honest!  Then we can see if this is going to go anywhere!

JADE
Okay … I’ll try.

ALEX
Good.

They hug.  Then Jade pulls back.
JADE
So you want me to be honest right?

ALEX
Right.

JADE
And that means giving you my honest opinion about everything, right?

ALEX
Right.

JADE
And you’re going to be honest with me, too, in all those ways, right?

ALEX (suspiciously)
Uh … right …

JADE
Well, last week you told me that you liked my song for the showcase.

ALEX
Yes.

JADE
You hate that style of music.

ALEX
But I thought it was a good example of that style of music.  So what I told you was true … from a certain point of view.

JADE
A certain point of view?

ALEX
Jade, you’re going to find that many of the truths we cling to depend greatly on our own point of view.

Jade pauses in thought for a moment.
JADE
Yeah, not buying it.

ALEX (shrugging)
It was worth a shot.

They smile at each other.

Why Polyamory Does Not Work as the Default Relationship

So, the WordPress default dashboard shows me what people have been reading, and since I don’t mind re-reading my own stuff sometimes I will decide to re-read the posts that people have been reading if I find them sufficiently interesting.  So someone had read this post on polyamory and Richard Carrier’s arguments for it and I re-read it and was reminded of the issue.  And since I was reminded of the issue, I started thinking about it off and on while doing my morning walks and other things where I think a lot about things.  And I came to a conclusion about the main difference between monoamory and polyamory that would, in general, make it so that if polyamory became the default it would be a very bad thing.

See, one thing I commented on there was that there’s a potential difference in power among the participants.  The person who cares less about maintaining the relationship has more power, because it’s easier for them to say “Give me this or I’ll end the relationship” and get the other partner to give in because they need the relationship more.  What is interesting about this is that it follows from the basic principle as Carrier establishes it that each member of the relationship is responsible for their own happiness and so are to be treating like consenting adults and work out whatever compromises work for them, and leave the relationship when such a compromise isn’t possible.  So the counter from Carrier would almost certainly be that negotiation will handle this and so any concerns about any sort of “power imbalance” would be just fundamentally misunderstanding the nature of such relationships and how one should approach them if they were the default.

So let’s look at a specific example.  Imagine that someone is in a relationship with someone who is providing money and resources that they need, in return for mostly a sexual relationship.  Before you protest that this would not be a moral relationship under polyamory, this is pretty much what Carrier suggested as a way for women to balance having children while giving up monoamory:

I know of several poor poly women and men who share resources to raise children. Whether those resources are money, property, time, or other things (like emotional labor).

So under polyamory it’s certainly reasonable, given negotiation, for someone to be providing crucial resources in exchange for something less crucial (like sex).

So if that’s the case, let’s imagine that that person wants to have sex more often than the other person does, and wants certain sex acts that the other person isn’t comfortable providing.  Thinking of their own self-interest, they conclude that the relationship isn’t worth maintaining unless the other person provides that.  Under what I think would be a proper and ethical polyamory, they ought to tell the other person about that and make it clear that they will end the relationship if they don’t get those things.  So now the other person is in a bit of a bind.  If they don’t provide those things, then the first person will end the relationship, and they will lose the crucial things that they get from it.  But if they do provide those things, then that will make them feel uncomfortable and at least a bit unhappy.  So they are forced to choose between participating in sex acts that they are not comfortable with or losing crucial resources.

Now, someone could argue that with the “negotiation” aspect of polyamory, this would be something that they are doing that’s completely consensual.  If they choose to compromise in that manner, then that’s entirely their choice.  The problem is that in this case — which is not one that is unexpected in polyamory — it really seems like they are being coerced into sexual acts that they are not comfortable with, and the modern idea of consent would not consider that entirely consensual.  And if someone argues that these relationships should never allow for that sort of compromise or negotiation of compromises, then that’s not only unrealistic and unreasonable, but would also mean that the first person should just leave them, which then deprives them of those resources, even if that was something that the other person might have been willing to compromise on.  But just stating that sort of desire can lead to the issue of feeling pressure to make that compromise for fear of losing crucial resources.  And the very nature of polyamory insists that the person cannot remain in the relationship if they don’t feel that they are getting their “money’s worth” from it, no matter how much the other person needs their resources.  As polyamory is primarily self-interested, no one can be made to act in a way that is against their own self-interests in the interest of someone else, and those resources that they are “spending” in this relationship can be put to better use elsewhere than in a relationship where they aren’t getting what they want out of it.

But looking at how this might work in a monoamorous relationship highlights the issues with polyamory even more sharply.  Imagine a couple on a monoamorous relationship, like a marriage.  One partner finds that they want sex more often than the other partner, and finds that they want certain sexual acts to be performed that the other partner is not comfortable with.  Because the other partner loves the first partner and know that this is making them less than ideally happy, they want to try to resolve it.  But the first partner — unless the other partner doesn’t tell them — knows that the other partner isn’t comfortable with that and that doing that will make them unhappy.  And since the first partner doesn’t want the other partner to be unhappy, they don’t want to demand that they do this.  Thus, both partners want to maximize the happiness of their partner and so the question becomes what compromise they can make.  So they might decide that the best compromise is an “open marriage”, where the first partner can seek out more partners who will provide more sex and more sex acts than the other partner is willing to do while the other partner feels that the first partner is still committed to them and so that it will be just about sex and there will not be any emotional commitment.

While there may be issues with this compromise solution, it ends up basically in the same place as the example of polyamory ends up in, but we can see that the approach is completely different.  For polyamory, both parties are to be looking out for their own interests, and both present solutions and raise issues entirely on the basis of it bothering them, relying on the other party to look out for their own interests.  Here, both partners are committed to the relationship and want the other partner to be happy, and so are willing to sacrifice some of their own happiness for the happiness of the other person … while the other partner doesn’t want them to do that.  Thus, any compromise comes out of the two of them trying to maximize the happiness of the couple, not of the individual persons.  Moreover, in a strict monoamory that sort of sexual incompatibility would not be a reason to end the relationship, so the compromise does not arise in response to an implied or direct threat of “the relationship will end if this doesn’t happen”.   Thus, there is no issue of a power imbalance or a threat of the relationship ending.  This all comes out of each partner wanting to make the other partner as happy as possible, which is not the case for polyamory, where anyone’s primary concern is their own happiness, not that of the other people in the relationship.

Now, one could argue that this is a misrepresentation of polyamory, as people practicing polyamory should like and consider the other people involved as well.  But my point is that the primary attitude is to maximize one’s own self-interest and allow the others to look out for their own self-interest.  This is the heart of the negotiation and consent aspects of polyamory.  As that’s the case, it must be the case that each partner feels free to walk away if the relationship isn’t satisfying them, especially if they think they can get something more satisfying somewhere else.  Given that with multiple of these relationships many of them will be based on a couple of properties, there might be only one or two things that are not being provided that are enough to get them to want to end the relationship.  And then if they make that clear the power imbalance comes into play.  With monoamory, the relationship itself is supposed to be as complete as it can get.  There is not one or even a few things that the person is in the relationship for.  They are supposed to want to spend the rest of their lives with that one person, and given that sort of attitude the focus is on maximizing the happiness of the couple, not the individuals in the couple.

Now, Carrier specifically could argue that all of our morality and considerations are based on the idea of maximizing our own self-interest, and so each partner ultimately feels that they are happier with that person than without them and so is still maximizing their own happiness.  That may — or may not, given my issues with that idea — be true, but the attitude is still different.  It really is a partnership, not a group of individuals negotiating terms and forming a relationship out of convenience.  It really does seem like what love should be:  two people joining together to one unit out of a complete and total love, as opposed to a simple relationship akin to a business relationship, based on mutual self-interest instead of mutual love.

So any polyamory based on negotiations around self-interest will run right into these sorts of issues.  A polyamory where all parties are equally in love with each other and dedicated to making each other happy could work — I remember watching a movie once about the creator of Wonder Woman who seems to have had that sort of relationship, so much so that when he died the other two maintained the relationship until they died, despite it not being socially acceptable — but that is not the sort of polyamory that Carrier advocates for or practices (although he wouldn’t be opposed to that either).  Ultimately, the majority of relationships that arise from polyamory will not have that sort of love where the focus is on the happiness of the other person, not on themselves.  And given that, it will ultimately be shallow and cold and lacking in the experience of true love.  And that is why polyamory ought not be the default relationship type.