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Posts Tagged ‘ranty’

video games as art

Link from jaylake: Roger Ebert on why video games can never be art.

I’ve got a lot of respect for Ebert, but in this instance I think he fails signally to construct a rigorous argument for his point, even as he’s taking apart Santiago for the same failure.

I could go through his article responding line by line, but that would produce an incredibly long and rambling post, so I’ll try to just hit the central points. First off, he dings Santiago for “lacking a convincing definition of art.” Given that no one has yet managed to come up with a truly convincing definition, that’s a bit unfair. And indeed, he immediately follows that criticism by asking, “But is Plato’s any better?” Okay, so he recognizes the contentious nature of definitions in the first place — but then the rest of the paragraph is spent on his own definition, which at the end, boils down to taste. Art is the amazing stuff. Everything else is . . . something else.

He clearly means “art” as a category of quality, rather than anything structurally defined. Which is an approach I fundamentally disagree with. To pick the simplest way of pointing out the flaw of that argument: Ebert says video games aren’t art (and won’t be) because none of the examples he’s seen impress him. But I guarantee you there are movies that do impress him which would bore me stiff, while there are video games I consider artful. The message I take away from his argument is that my opinion doesn’t matter; only his does, and people who agree with him. And that’s why quality as the delimiter of “what’s art?” is a bad way to go.

More ways in which he’s wrong . . . .

a question

What is it with the writers of Dexter and incompetent female police lieutenants who only got their jobs for political reasons?

LaGuerta lied to earn her promotion, flirts with her subordinates, allows her a priori dislike of another female officer to hamper the progress of an investigation, and generally has the sole redeeming professional quality of being a media darling. It wouldn’t bug me so much if her replacement were an improvement, but no — Pasquale’s even worse. Granted, the chief of police is a jerk who makes plenty of his own mistakes, so it isn’t like women are being singled out as bad leaders. But the ep I just watched had the chief saying Pasquale “set back women in this department by twenty years,” while the only alternative the show has yet offered me is LaGuerta.

And the only other female cop shown in detail is Debra Morgan, who is sometimes so stupid and clueless and clumsy in her interactions with people that I want to kick her in the head. (Seriously, Debra — you’ve been a Miami cop for how long, and yet your Spanish is worse than mine?) Yes, she sometimes does things successfully, and so does LaGuerta — but it feels like those things happen despite the characters’ manifest incompetence at basic aspects of their job.

I’d like there to be one woman on the police force, in a leadership position or otherwise, who’s decent at her job the way that Doakes and Angel and Masuka are. The men’s character flaws don’t make me question their fitness for the job. And given that women in male-dominated fields generally have to be more competent to earn respect and promotion, the scenario Dexter presents me with feels all the more implausible.

Holy hell.

Facebook has shut down the group “People Against Racebending: Protest of the Cast of The Last Airbender Movie,” apparently on the grounds that its campaigning against the whitewashing of the movie constitutes being “hateful, threatening, or obscene [… or that it] attack[s] an individual or group, or advertise[s] a product or service.”

I’ve already got a lot of reasons for not liking Facebook. Now I have a new one. And while I don’t know for sure that the people behind the movie (Shyamalan or the production company or whoever) pushed Facebook to do this, it’s certainly the first and most likely possibility that springs to mind. Because that group’s been around for months, with over six thousand members. Something had to bring it to Facebook’s attention and insist it was a problem. And that something was almost certainly a someone — a someone with a vested interest in shutting down protest.

This? Is not. cool. For all the reasons that Hal Duncan outlines at that first link, and more besides. If anybody hears word of useful things to do in response, please let me know.

no more Ms. Nice Writer

I’ve gotten decidedly snippier with the queries I send to magazines when they’ve held my story for an unreasonably long time. These aren’t your everyday queries — “hey, Strange Horizons, you say to nudge you after 70 days, so I’m politely nudging” — this is the “hey you’ve had it for a year and I queried and you said you’d gone on hiatus (would have been nice if you told anyone that) but you’d have a response for me Real Soon Now but it’s been another three months since then” kind of query.

The really sad part is, I’m betting half the short story writers reading this post just thought, “I wonder if she’s talking about Market X,” where Market X could be one of a number of different ‘zines. I’ve actually sent out more than one of these queries lately. Which is a really depressing statement on the lack of professional behavior to be found in some corners of our field. I know that precious few editors out there actually do this as a job, and I cut very large amounts of slack for that; a market pretty much has to have a regular response time above six months before I’ll consider them “slow,” and all too often I let a year go by before I actually get annoyed. But when you do things like putting your magazine or anthology on hiatus without informing the people in your slush pile (or even announcing it anywhere other people might see), or ignoring polite queries for months on end, or continually promising results you don’t deliver . . . eventually, I do lose patience.

And it’s started to show up in those late-stage queries. I’m not rude — at least, I try not to be — but I’m less forgiving. I’ve been burned a little too much lately by editors jerking me around to cut anyone endless slack anymore. I’m confident enough in myself now to say I have better things to do than waste my time on this kind of crap.

Not confident enough that I haven’t second- and third-guessed my decision to post this, but hey. I haven’t named names, and I think we do need to occasionally remind ourselves that not everything is reasonable. When I start having to specify what year a story got submitted in, things have gone too far.

your daily dose of gender rage

Cat Valente (yuki_onna) is on a roll at the moment, first with a splendid jab at the gendering of deodorant marketing (men get Science! women get Squishy Feelings!), and then with a right hook that takes down Super Bowl commercials.

Pretty much all I have to say is, right on. This is why I hate watching TV as it airs; this is why I stay away from sitcoms and comedic movies in general. Because they present me with this awful, appalling world of Bitchy Women and Immature Men and How They’ll Never Understand One Another, and then they ask me to find it funny. And not only do I not find it funny, I don’t want to. I look at the world they’re trying to sell me, and I hate it.

Amazon vs. Macmillan: my verdict

The part behind the cut is going to be long and somewhat arcane, but if you want to know some of how the sausage gets made — just what’s going on with ebooks and Kindles, how pricing gets determined, and why Amazon’s strategy is problematic for the industry (let alone the petulance of their tactics) — then read onward. Outside the cut, I’ll point you at the response from Macmillan’s CEO, and the more belated response from Amazon’s Kindle Team (dissected by anghara). If you read only one other thing on the topic, it should be John Scalzi’s magesterial (and highly amusing) analysis of how Amazon failed, because his post is about the tactics, and why they were such a resoundingly bad idea. The rest of this will be about the strategy, the behind-the-scenes stuff that explains why so much of the publishing industry is up in arms against Amazon.

Macmillan may not be the good guy, but they’re the better guy in this particular war.

a brief note on the Amazon thing

Short form, for those who haven’t heard: Macmillan (publishing conglomerate that includes, among other companies, Tor) allegedly told Amazon (you know who they are, I imagine) that they wanted to price their ebooks at $15, and Amazon, in refusing to cooperate, has stopped selling Macmillan’s books. Not their ebooks; all of their books. As in, right now you can buy the Wheel of Time used from third-party sellers, but not from Amazon.

Oh, and undoubtedly this has to to with the iPad thing — Macmillan is one of the corporations that struck a deal with Apple for the iBookstore.

Cory Doctorow has a good analysis of what that means, and I think it’s a good analysis even if you’re not usually on board with his copyright agenda (as I’m aware many people aren’t). Shorter Cory: Macmillan’s $15 thing is dumb, but what Amazon did is a hell of a lot dumber, and either way it’s like two bull elephants going tusk-to-tusk while the rest of us, the writers and readers, get trampled underfoot. This is the consequence of the conglomeration of publishing, and it really isn’t a good thing.

Lots of other people have commented. John Scalzi here and here, Jay Lake here and here; also Jim Hines, Cat Valente, Janni Lee Simner, others I’ll undoubtedly see when I open up my Google Reader, and more besides.

At the moment? I’m waiting for more information. Nothing’s certain at the moment, not even that the pulling of the books was done by Amazon rather than Macmillan (though it seems very likely). Lots of authors have pulled the Amazon links from their sites. I haven’t done that yet, mostly because a) there are a lot of them to pull and b) we don’t have the full story yet; I’d be pissed if I went to all that work only to learn something that paints Amazon in a better light. I’m not real optimistic about that, mind you, but I figure it doesn’t hurt to wait another day or two. Once I know for sure what’s up with this, then I’ll make my decision.

But I gotta tell you, Amazon’s done some kind of craptastic things in the past, and adding this one to the list does more than put a bad taste in my mouth. As Jay says, what they appear to have done isn’t precisely wrong — they’re within their rights to decide which products to stock — but the implications of it are deeply troubling. Amazon isn’t just a retailer; they dominate the audiobook market, and have been trying to lock down the ebook market, in ways that aren’t good for any of us. They’ve tried before to use that weight to strongarm publishers into doing things their way (insert industry neepery here, of a lower-profile sort), and if they succeed, we’re all going to lose.

Things to make you chew on the walls

Back in September of last year, I wrote a post for SF Novelists about the Bechdel Test. Well, a few days ago I came across a post — don’t remember how I found it — from Jennifer Kesler, written in 2008, about why film schools teach screenwriters not to pass that test.

Short form: “The audience doesn’t want to listen to a bunch of women talking about whatever it is women talk about.”

(Which is a direct quote from either a film-school professor or an industry professional — it’s not clear from the context who said it.)

There’s a lot more where that came from; follow the links in the posts, and the “related articles” links at the bottom. Like this one, in which Ms. Kesler relates how her screenwriting classes instructed her that “The real reason […] to put women in a script was to reveal things about the men.” For example, the female characters have to be attracted to the male lead in order to communicate that he is a babe magnet and therefore worthy of being admired by the target audience, which is of course male (and straight).

Ms. Kesler eventually quit screenwriting, not because nobody around her wanted to do anything other than straight white men’s stories, but because the machine is so finely tuned to crush any attempts to do otherwise. Criticize Joss Whedon’s gender depiction all you like — there’s plenty to chew on in his work — but never forget that Buffy was seven seasons of a show with multiple interesting female characters, who regularly talked to one another about something other than men (or shoes). How many other creators have managed to get anything comparable through the industry meat-grinder? And apparently one of the rationales behind canceling Firefly was that it rated too highly with women. You see, advertising slots aimed at women go for cheaper than those aimed at men, which meant Firefly brought in less revenue for Fox. So off it goes.

Because the female audience doesn’t matter. We’re talking about an industry where a WB executive can say that he isn’t going to make movies with female leads anymore, because they just aren’t profitable enough. (Sorry, I lost the link for that quote. Mea culpa.) An industry where they can write off Terminator and Alien as non-replicable flukes. Where they look at the droves of women who flocked to The Matrix and conclude, not that women like action movies too, or that Trinity appealed to them, or even that they wanted to look at Keanu Reeves, but that they were accompanying their boyfriends or husbands. Where they look at the failure of, say, Catwoman, and instead of swearing off Halle Berry or the director or the committee of six people who wrote the script — instead of saying, “hey, maybe we should try to make a movie that doesn’t suck” — they swear off superheroines. Because clearly that’s where the error lies.

There’s no particular point I’m trying to arrive at, here; the topic is a kraken, and all I can do is hack away at a tentacle here, a tentacle there. And try to feel good about the fact that at least the situation in fiction isn’t a tenth so dire as it is in Hollywood. (One of the most valuable things that came out of the intersection of my anthro background, my interest in media, and my professional writing is that I became much more aware of how texts are shaped by the process of their production. I wish more criticism, of the academic variety, took that into account.) Anyway, read ’em and weep, and then look for ways to make it better, I guess.

signals that deserve boosting

Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.

Watts’ own account of the incident.

Here’s the thing. In the various comment threads on the many posts advertising this incident, you will find people popping up to make the inevitable argument that Watts probably brought this on himself, not by actually assaulting anyone (the charge), but by not being sufficiently respectful to the border guards.

And that attitude is, quite simply, part of the problem. Because it says we have to knuckle under, not ask why we’re being detained, not question authority, not demand the basic right of knowing what’s happening to us. Last time I checked, though, that is not actually how our laws work. Even if Watts was disrespectful, that isn’t a crime. Cops even get training in how to cope with people getting up in their faces, without resorting to violence, because punching and kicking and pepper-spraying someone is not an acceptable response to being shouted at, or called an asshole. But rent-a-cops don’t always, and given the growing tendency to outsource these jobs in America, I won’t be surprised at all if these guards turn out to be contractors — who seem to be statistically more likely to get drunk on their own authority.

Authority which goes only a certain distance, and no further. So telling us we should bow down when it pushes pasts its bounds, and it’s our own fault if we get punished for being mouthy, only reinforces their bad behavior.

Even if you can’t agree with that, then agree with this: that turning a guy out, at night, into a winter storm, without even his coat, isn’t an acceptable response to anything.

If you’d like to donate to his legal defense, details are at the first link. Either way, the more noise gets made about this, the more likely it will be picked up by news outlets, which means we’re more likely to get proper investigation into the matter and maybe steps taken to make things right. We can hope, anyway.

irony

And after that last post?

Two e-mails have shown up in my inbox, advertising Black Friday special offers. Granted, for online shopping rather than some doors-open-at-midnight riot, but still.

Reminds me, too — I need to get myself taken off those lists.

stomach-turning

It occurs to me that it’s more useful to post this today than two days from now.

I’ve condemned Black Friday before. This year, Teresa Nielsen-Hayden at Making Light does it way better than I can, focusing on Wal-Mart and the company’s persistent refusal to institute measures that would decrease the frenzy and protect both customers and employees.

It isn’t like this takes them by surprise, people. That post documents a four-year history of injuries and property damage, hospitalizations and crowd violence that takes police to shut them down. And there are well-defined methods of reducing that risk.

They do not include tossing laptops at the crowd like t-shirts during a rock concert.

When your employees are making statements like “They trampled each other for ’em, […] It was great,” then something has gone horrifically wrong. Wal-Mart’s corporate masters create and feed the mob mentality, because it benefits their bottom line. But the cost to the rest of us — including their employees — is sickening.

Jim says it all — or at least 90% of it

Fellow author Jim C. Hines has posted on numerous occasions before about rape — its causes and consequences, our cultural attitudes surrounding it — based on his experiences as a rape counselor. It’s unsurprising, therefore, that he would post about the Polanski situation, and utterly demolish the various defenses on Polanski’s behalf.

(He does overlook the Hitler/Manson one. To which we can quote the comment thread: Your own victimhood doesn’t give you a right to make somebody else a victim.)

I don’t have much to add to that. Only an incomplete thought on what should happen now.

What do we stand to gain by imprisoning the man, or otherwise punishing him? There are three obvious possibilities. One is vengeance: make him suffer because he made someone else suffer. (No, thirty years of gilded exile as a well-respected filmmaker does not count as suffering. Not in my book.) But our justice system is, at least in theory, not about vengeance, and the victim — the one with the most claim to this angle — has said she doesn’t want it. Another is prevention: lock Polanski up so he can’t do this again. We’re a bit late, seeing as how he’s had thirty years plus in which to do it again, but there’s perhaps a faint bit of merit left in this one. The third angle, of course, is deterrence: we lock Polanski up so some other guy (whether a prominent filmmaker or not) will think twice before he drugs and rapes a thirteen-year-old. But it seems to be sadly true that prison-as-deterrence is not nearly so effective as you’d like to think.

I see a fourth angle, though, hiding in the shadow of deterrence, very similar but not quite the same. Call it principle. This is the bit where the community of the United States, and more specifically the state of California, as manifested in its criminal justice system, stands up and says very publicly that THIS IS NOT OKAY.

It is not okay to drug and rape a thirteen-year-old girl, over her continued and consistent protests. Even if you’ve had a bad life. Even if you thought she was older. Even if her mother shoved the kid at you. Even if you’ve made some art that people really like. It is also not okay to plead guilty and then flee before your sentencing. Even if you think the judge was going to be harsh. Even if you were afraid of going to jail. And if you do these things, you will suffer consequences.

It isn’t just about scaring the criminals off. It’s about teaching all the rest of society, all the ones who aren’t criminals, that these crimes are something they can and should do something about. It’s a lesson I fear too much of society still hasn’t learned, where rape is concerned, because we still hear all the usual defenses. She shouldn’t have gone there. She shouldn’t have trusted him. She shouldn’t have been wearing that dress, that makeup, those shoes. And you know, it isn’t that big a deal anyway, let’s feel some sympathy for the poor guy who raped her, because now he’s being blamed for what he did.

When the day comes that somebody like Polanski rapes a thirteen-year-old and nobody says “He thought she was older” as if it would have been okay for him to rape an eighteen-year-old, then I’ll feel like we’re making progress. And maybe then I’ll feel it’s okay to show him leniency after thirty years of escaping justice. Maybe. But we’re still light-years away from that, apparently.

In the meantime . . . I don’t know what’s the right punishment here. I find myself wondering what the penalty is for fleeing sentencing after you’ve pled guilty. It would make a good minimum to start with.

on the topic of history education

In light of my earlier rant about post-Reconstruction history education (especially in Texas), I now kind of want to slam my head into a wall until the pain goes away.

The snarky response here, of course, is that it hardly matters what the standards are, since the students will never make it past Reconstruction anyway. But snark aside . . . it’s enough to make me cry blood.

I love my home state, but in the way one loves a child that really needs to be sent to reform school for its own good.

what the hell did we spend our time learning?

Watched Charlie Wilson’s War last night.

Got furious, again, over the state of history education in this country.

Maybe somewhere in the U.S., there are schools that do a decent job teaching history. God knows I didn’t go to one of them, and neither did anybody I’ve ever talked to about this. We never seemed to make it past the Civil War; even in junior high, when U.S. history was split over two years, the first one ending with the Civil War and Reconstruction, we still didn’t get through the twentieth century. Why? Because we started the second year by recapping . . . the Civil War and Reconstruction. And then got bogged down reading All Quiet on the Western Front. I know nothing about the Korean War. (Except that I think technically I’m supposed to call it the Korean Conflict.) What I know about Vietnam, I got from movies. Ditto WWII, mostly. And when it comes to things like Afghanistan (the subject of Charlie Wilson’s War) or our involvement in Iran, there are whole oceans of historical incident I’m ignorant of.

Historical incident that is very goddamned relevant right now. How many people in the U.S. — especially those under the age of 30 — understand the ways in which our problems in Afghanistan are of our own creation? We wanted to stop the Soviets, so we poured weapons and support into the hands of the Afghans, and then wandered off as soon as the commies went away. What’s worse than rampant interventionism? Half-assed interventionism. But thank God we’ve learned our les — oh, wait.

You can’t learn from history if you never learned it in the first place, people.

I want the history textbook I never got. I want a single-volume overview of United States history, 1900-1999, that will tell me the basics about the Korean War Conflict and Vietnam, about Afghanistan and Iran and Iran-Contra and the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban Missile Crisis, about all those things that were kind of important to U.S. policy and foreign relations that might be tripping us up today, and most especially about the ones I’ve never even heard of and so can’t list here. Bonus points if it has colorful pictures and informative sidebars and maybe a brief quiz at the end of each chapter, because when it comes to this stuff, I’m about at a junior-high level of comprehension.

I don’t even know if that book exists. If it does, I don’t have time to read it anyway, because the downside of writing the Onyx Court series is that most of my nonfiction reading is about Britain. But I can always buy it and hold onto it until the next time I hear about some war I never even knew we fought, and then maybe I’ll drop everything for a few days and learn about my own country.

I’ll verb whatever I want to

Long ago, Tantalus turned into a verb: if something tempts you but you’re never allowed to have it, it is tantalizing you. Well, I hereby declare the verbing of Sisyphus, henceforth to be used for tasks which undo themselves every time you finish them.

As you might guess, this is because I’m being sisyphized by something right now. And not just in the usual laundry-and-dishes sense.

(Ixionizing, I suppose, would be when something goes round and round without ever getting anywhere at all, like a hamster on a wheel. Or, well, Ixion. On his wheel.)

damn you, British astronomers!

I’ve been digging for ages now, attempting to discover when people in Britain first sighted Halley’s comet in 1759. Not when it was first seen in general; I know Palitzsch spotted it on Christmas Day, 1758, and Messier picked it up a month later, and then lots of people saw it after perihelion, throughout March and April. So I figured that if I aimed to have this book in seven sections, one per season, then I should start in summer 1757, because odds were it got spotted in Britain some time in winter 1759.

Those lazy bastards of eighteenth-century British astronomy apparently didn’t pick up the damn thing until April 30th. Which means that, for the purpose of my structure, I need to start the book in autumn 1757.

It isn’t a simple matter of changing date stamps on the scenes, either. Galen’s conversation with his father is partly predicated on the assumption that it’s summer, and therefore a lousy time to be attempting any kind of large-scale social networking. Ergo, his attempts on that front don’t begin until part two. Also, there’s a scene that has to take place on October 3rd, but part one is too early to use it, so I’ll have to rework that idea for part five instead. Etc. Etc.

The worst part is, I think this change will be a good thing. Example: I couldn’t introduce the Royal Society properly until part two, because they were on hiatus from June until November 10th. Problem solved! Now I can have them in play sooner. Another example: there was a comet sighted in late September/early October, that I was having trouble working into the scene flow of part two. It will, however, do very nicely for an early note in part one. I suspect a whole lot of things will balance out more usefully once I boot the story back one season. But this is going to mean a crap-ton of very frustrating revision on the 33.5K I already have written, because I didn’t find the answer I needed until just now. And that’s almost certainly going to put me behind, because I think I need to get my extant wordage sorted out before I’ll be okay to proceed forward.

Snarl.

And sigh. I do think things will be better this way. But I’m rather ticked at myself for not turning this info up sooner, and at Bradley and all his cohort for failing to spot the bloody comet until almost May. We’re going to have to make some changes around here . . . .

writing-ish things

Important one first: John Klima of Electric Velocipede is looking to move some stock and help out his finances to boot. Head on over there to see what’s on offer — back issues of EV, plus chapbooks. If you’re looking for my fiction, issue #13 is the one you want; that has “Selection,” which might very well be the oddest short story I’ve ever written. It also has Rachel Swirsky’s excellent “How the World Became Quiet: A Post-Human Creation Myth,” which I suspect some of you would really dig. (If you perked up at the word “post-human,” then yes, I mean you.)

Sillier, but very true: a rant against Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. I’ve become more jaundiced about that book over time, so it’s good to see my jaundice backed up with some evidence.

And a distinct moment of oddity: someone on Amazon claims to be selling a copy of In Ashes Lie for the low, low price of $1,000 dollars. Yes, that’s a comma, not a decimal point (and yes, that’s American-style notation). No, I have no idea what’s up with that. Even if they’ve gotten ahold of an early copy, a thousand bucks??? WTF, mate.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled whatever you’ve been doing.

Amazon update

One of the negative features of kerfuffles is that the outrage tends to spread a lot farther than the eventual explanation does. Not that this explanation doesn’t have its own problems, but it’s better than the “lobotomy + homophobia = FAIL” equation people at first assumed.

According to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, the thing was a consequence of what strikes me as an extraordinarily dumb programming decision. Somebody made an erroneous category-edit in France, and it propagated from Amazon.fr through to all the rest of them. This has more discussion of Amazon’s internal operations, and how errors like this end up happening.

What’s the line about never attributing to malevolence what can be explained by mere stupidity? I suspect Amazon’s site architecture could use some work.

two things that make me angry

I’ll put the important one first: a lengthy article on Dubai that frankly just turns my stomach, presenting both the dark underside and the artificially bright topside of that city. I presume not everybody in Dubai is like the Emiratis and expats quoted there, but that’s the image of Dubai I’ve seen marketed: a sunny playground for shopping and leisure, to be enjoyed by the wealthy — just don’t ask what’s propping it up.

The second one’s smaller, but closer to home: apprehension about Pixar’s latest, Up. Why the apprehension? Are they worried it will be a flop? No; in fact, everybody’s pretty much assuming it will be a critical and commercial success. But probably it won’t be as big of a hit as (say) Toy Story, and (perhaps more to the point) it doesn’t have all the merchandising opportunities of that film, and so nevermind that Pixar has yet to release a single film that could be termed a critical or commercial flop; some corners of the industry are worried that Pixar’s films aren’t as lucrative as they used to be, and this is a problem. Not that they aren’t profitable; they are. But that they aren’t always increasing in profits.

I find that outlook diseased. Here we have a rock-solid company that has, since its inception, turned out quality entertainment that also brings in a nice, healthy return on the investment of making it. But hits, it seems, aren’t enough; they must be mega-hits, and ever-growing in size, or Wall Street will flip out.

Can you say “unsustainable model”? I can.

Anyway. I’ve had those tabs open in my browser for a couple of days, but I decided not to rain on Easter Sunday with them, so you get them today. Enjoy. So to speak.