Days of Shades

The last time I read up on procedures I had as a teen, I read, basically, "Oh, that was excruciatingly painful and left really nasty-ass scarring. We do it better now."

This time I found "Growth plate stapling was used because growth would resume when staples were removed. And then people realized it didn't."

So, er, yeah, the staples in my growth plate to temporarily halt growth and twist my knee back into position may theoretically be contributing to weirdness now? It's amazing what you learn when you haven't actually had an X-ray in ten years.

Also, if anyone's really macabre and wants inch-long titanium staples that were in my knee when I was sixteen, I still have 'em in a little plastic baggy. I'm thinking of mailing them to my friend Evan.

Without an explanation.

Woke up in a seriously weird head-space. Stumbled to internet: discovered 'what tropes are your characters?' meme, and wanted to fill it out for Rhi (her, specifically -- all Shepard's are The Captain; it goes with the Cool Ship). The one that immediately springs to mind is Badass Biker.

Luckily, I realize this is basically self-involved egotistic obsession with my own creation, so instead of actually digging through TVTropes to find fitting candidates I'll instead go play work in my yard and clean the house.

Right, brain?

Right.

Besides, this kind of thing ought to be farmed out to my most trope savvy friend. westrider, I'm SURE you immediately thought of more! :P

Okay, I have to admit... despite the fact that all of my previous complaints regarding twitter still hold true, it's strangely addictive.

Oops.

Finally driven to get a twitter account for one reason and one reason only.

Man, that's a sucky form of communication. Like society needs to be more over-simplified, black-and-white, and sound-bytey.

Special challenges do make one want to get experimental, though. Hard to resist urge to write haiku.

I am stubborn as a mule and have never had trouble voicing my opinion. It can be hard for me to empathise with people who really have trouble standing up for themselves; there are a lot of times when my reaction is pretty much 'grow up and deal with it.' There are issues where, if I encounter them in real life, I have no problem either proving myself or bulling my way through it regardless. In fact, the few times I've encountered really overt sexism*, I've kind of enjoyed basically ignoring them and being competent anyway.

But.

I've been engaging in more and more of these fights on the net, because I've grown up enough to realize that just because I can fight my way through a situation, doesn't mean anyone else should have to.

I'm slightly ashamed to admit that it took two instances in which I was really pushed to my emotional limits in order for me to gain that empathy. Both were egregious examples of bullying; one was at work, one a neighbor. In one case I did tough it out, in the other I finally called in help.

Because of the latter case, I still jump when someone rings the doorbell. My heart-rate shoots up. My family and friends have been requested to knock, instead. It's an awful, awful, helpless feeling. It took a lot to get me to that point, but just because someone else may reach it with less provocation, doesn't make it any less awful for them.

The realization holds true for a great many issues.

I've been paying more attention to various serious discussions online, and more often coming down on the side of the hard-core 'PC'** crowd than I used to. Part of that is having more innate understanding of how some issues trigger people. Some of it is because I'm seeing so much thinly veiled (or even overt) racism and sexism on mainstream media lately -- the fringe elements of the right wing have been driving their party, and some vile stuff has become almost commonplace***. And a lot of it is because over and over again, I see problems brought up that I seriously thought we'd matured beyond, and people pour out of the woodwork to prove me wrong.

Example: I really don't think we should be mutilating kids for our aesthetic or religious reasons; if I had a kid, they wouldn't get an infant earpiercing or a circumcision. But when the subject of circumcision comes up, we really need to be aware that female circumcision is pretty much brutally harmful in every case, which would seem to me to make it a rather more urgent issue than male circumcision. And yet every time I've seen a blog post about this, it has almost immediately become entirely filled with people saying "Why didn't you write about the men, too?!"

It's entitled behavior like that, rather than arguments from feminists, that has made me happier to self-identify as feminist.

(I thought about using domestic abuse as an example, since women are more likely to be injured in domestic abuse cases, but it's also clear that men under-report domestic abuse. Guys: This is not an example of eeevil reverse sexism. This is a perfect example of The Patriarchy Hurts Men Too).

Digression: Just because someone chooses to adress one issue in an article or blog post, it does not mean that they don't care about all the other related issues. It means that they decided on a certain scope for this particular discussion. Demanding that they they cover every related issue is derailing at best.(end digression).

I admit to being shocked by just how far we haven't come. I think part of it is that any time you're in a time of cultural flux, you're dealing with different rates of change. I can't believe we're still having arguments about the ethics of birth control. Seriously? But the fact is, we are. So we've got people who really, genuinely are doing their best to be even-handed and treat people as people, those who really do think a woman's place is in the kitchen, and every bus stop in between. There are also those who seem to have skipped all the middle stops and thing we're over all this and can't be bothered (apparently they haven't met the kitchen people). This can put you in the position of having several different debates at once.

On an individual level, I firmly believe in treating individuals as individuals. People are people, regardless of race, gender, or creed.

On a societal level, we need to be aware that we do NOT start on a level playing field, and we DO have a duty to be mindful of our own assumptions, because societally perpetuating crap holds us back from real equality.

This all came to a head because I've followed both the elevator crap in the skeptic community AND the recent femShep stuff in the gaming community, if anyone's wondering.

Anyway, be well.


*Directed at me, I'm not referring to societal/cultural stuff here.

**I have to point out here that 'hardcore PC' is usually a term used by their detractors; it's more often a case of 'this simple ettiquette rule will help you come across as a decent human being'.

***Everyone see the lady who equated insurance covering birth control to covering a mani-pedi? Yeah. THAT kind of crap.

I've been down for a week with Chest Cold Two: Bride of Cold, which has keept me basically useless for anything other than napping and dorking around on the computer.

Due to a combination of cold meds and too much Dragon Age II, I had a vivid dream in which I was in a city on the eve of war (between mages and templars. Dragon Age). The factions were gathering in the streets, full battle was inevitable, and the only outcome could be carnage... but still, I stunned all of my faithful companions by venturing out alone into no-man's land, standing between the opposing armies, and...

singing Jonathan Coulton's "First of May."



Everyone listened! People stopped sharpening blades and muttering incantations! For a moment, it seemed like it just might work! My people WOULD get together outside!

And then that little dream voice, the nagging one that tells you "wait, this isn't your house. Rabbits don't come in purple. Have you forgotten about gravity?" says:

"It will never work. It's April."

It is perhaps telling that the next morning when I told my housemate madalchemist the first thing he said was.

"But... it's April!"

Then, after a moment of consideration, he expressed suprise at the idea of solving armed ideological conflict with massive outdoor orgies.

But. But. APRIL!

Just discovered that FanFiction.net has 96 works listed under Minesweeper. Minesweeper!

Of course I had to check, and no, it turns out there are no entries for Frogger.

But there are 116 works for Pong.

Which means criada might have been the first person to write Frogger/Pong slash. For me! In this very journal!

I'm so proud.

I just posted my drop-front desk to craiglist, and then got distracted, as one tends too. Here are the most amusing listings for your perusal:

Real life babies - $300
"I have one completed baby, one partly done..."*

Older Farm Couple - $30

There are also barter listings that make you want the whole story, like the guy who wants to trade his paintball gear for a grow-light (tired of the active lifestyle?), or the headline "Looking for a riding mower or motorcycle."

And now, off to the session.

*Truncated to preserve your amusement. Apparently it's about dolls.

I would very much like to know why the feed for SkellingtonArt.com just spewed forth two empty-nonsense posts with dead links.

I would not be suprised if it source related, rather than LJ.

EDIT: Definitely something with the way Zenphoto generates the feed. Not sure what set it off, though. There was one (spam) comment left on the page, but it oughtn't to have shown up in the feed. Huh.

I've started adding some of my musician sketches to Skellington Art.

It's a fairly slow process, since I have to dig through sketchbooks to find sketches, scan them, and then edit them for web. There are about nine sketchbooks, and given that many of them are light graphite, a considerable amount of re-scanning involved. Oh, and I don't have a scanner.

There IS an RSS feed for SkellingtonArt.com! You can choose to see news, new art, or both. I think I'd need a paid account to make a feed people could follow on LJ, though.

Does anyone know whether feeds made by a paid account last indefinitely? I could buy a month worth of paid LJ use, set it up, then cancel, if the feed was still there.