Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 13016.128

Our destination is Ironius Paintorus III in the Wyrd system. Preparations are underway to present the representatives with a scientific gift that will interface with their technology, but not be of their own making. The engineers ensure me that all of the components are available and assembled. My Science officer will be calibrating the prototype model while the ship's Counselor will be overseeing the final preparations. We must arrive and present the model no later than the morning of 13016.130, or all is for naught.

This is a personal entry. It is a little bit on the long side. It is a post that many should probably skip. There is a bit of me feeling sorry for myself in this post. This post may contain Too Much Information (TMI). Consider that a final warning that you will not get back the time it took to read the remainder. I feel it is important to share life's hiccups on occasion, and I have the time to do so right now.

The Cycle Rolls Over

I do not make New Year's resolutions. I have considered them, but the way I figure, if there is something I was not going to do then I was unlikely to do it merely because the date changed.

I tend not to perform a focused reflection on the past year either. I am constantly looking back at my life. It's just not normally in a compartmentalized way such as placing events in boxes marked by years. In fact, I rarely put the past away at all. I simply leave it open like a festering wound to watch it turn green over time as I focus on it and seldom address the past in a meaningful way other than to permit it to depress me and attribute to my inaction in the future. Maybe this is something I should try.

Whisps of Smoke

I was planning on posting Part 2 of the Zappcon 2015 breakdown today. I simply wanted to state that I will wait at least one more day before posting the follow up to my last post in case anyone was waiting for it. Upon waking, I discovered a friend had died. This post contains adult language.

That One Time I Spotted a Paint Huffer

Imagine coming home in the afternoon. One of your neighbors is sprawled out on their porch with a can of spray paint in one hand, two more on the ground next to them, and a box about a foot and a half from their face. What would you do? In this situation, most neighbors went on their way never saying anything. Nobody ever did say anything to the man laid out on his porch, but one did report that there was somebody huffing paint on their porch in front of God and everybody. That neighbor demanded the management of the complex serve an eviction notice immediately. The manager sent someone around to check. Sure enough, there I was fanning a box where the inside was painted black with three cans of paint sitting next to me.

As some of my posts can attest to, I will occasionally paint miniatures. Part of that process for me involves spraying primer at the start of a project, or applying varnish at the end. As this blog can also attest to, I am physically disabled. I am unable to sit up on my own.

That day I had crawled out of my sliding glass door onto my porch which is open on three sides because it offers ventilation where I do not have that luxury indoors. Because of my physical limitations I was using one arm to prop myself up, and the other arm to alternate between spraying the models, fanning the models, flipping the models, and turning the box. The box in question this time was actually the Savage Orcs unit box sitting inside a shallow box that used to hold packs of ramen noodles. The clearance between the top of the box the models were sitting on and the sides of the ramen box was less than three inches. It's nothing fancy, but it keeps the paint off of the porch without having to go through the trouble of laying out a sheet or spreading papers.

Most of the time my face was probably about a foot and a half to two feet away from the box. There were moments I was shoving my face right in there to get a good look at how the models were being covered with the primer. I was also experimenting with priming in black then using a brown spray paint to create an undertone over the entirety of those models. It did not work for me as the spray paint was too smooth for my purposes, but that was the explanation for one of the spray bottles. I always take out at least one can of either grae or white with me when priming black as well in case I decide at the last minute I want to preshade without having to crawl all the way back to my room then to the porch again.

I am not mad or upset the neighbor did this. It makes perfect sense to me how someone could perceive my actions as an attempt to get high. I do the same thing. One of the things I do on this blog is share my opinions. I take the information I have available to me and offer my viewpoint. It is extremely rare to have all information on a subject. Even if I did, my opinions are not facts. I realize this even though it does not always occur to me to state this each time I share an opinion. My opinions are my attempt to make sense of the pieces I do have at hand. I try to find more pieces when I realize I am missing pieces. I also like to share those pieces as my understanding changes with them. I try not to make demands or assume I know what is going on based on my perceptions, but my opinions are formed by them.

I am sharing the story to illustrate how we interpret what reality presents us with. Not once did any of the neighbors who passed by my porch inquire as to what I was doing. Neither did the person the office send by to see what I was doing. In fact, none of the people that passed me as I laid on the porch with my head shoved in a box of fresh paint uttered a single word to me. They saw what was in front of them and applied common sense in order to determine what the reality of the situation was.

Cosplay =/= Consent

Adrianne Curry made Comic Con news again this year. Originally for her great costumes, I loved her animated Cat Woman, but also for using a whip on a male that shoved his finger in a friend's butt crack. I will not provide the name of her friend as I do not know how she feels about having her name out there for this. This news was bad enough. What was worse however was that the three people in the story were far and away from being in a private locale. There were many onlookers. Nobody but Adrianne Curry did anything.

Then there was the story about a girl that was found bleeding and unconscious after getting in a fight with her friends and leaving the convention by herself.

Like many out there, I shared the news on my Facebook page early on. I know people that attended Comic Con and the police were looking for pictures of her or anything else that could help them put together a timeline of events. I did not have any responses directly to my posting of the news, but some friends shared the news shortly thereafter. The responses were, I guess one could say interesting, but I feel were more symptomatic of how we attempt to disassociate ourselves from things we do not want to acknowledge.

A common response was that it might be a hoax. This is a reasonable response. It is the internet after all and the only information the public had when this started was a mother asking a friend of the girl to turn to the internet asking for help online along with incorrect information on the police department handling the investigation. There were some indicators such as the girl's Facebook and Twitter accounts not seeing any updates, but it was Comic Con and many attendees have trouble finding time to post during the event. Early information could only be described as sketchy at best.

There were some calling for others to wait for more information before anybody asked people that might have seen the girl get in touch with the police. "It would help no one if the police should find themselves overwhelmed with "helpful" people," as one responder put it. The quotation around the word helpful was a direct repaste.

There were many other responses. A common one was rage, both at the idea of what happened, and at the idea of the whole thing being a hoax. One argument I read a few times was how spreading this hurt geek culture. Another viewpoint shared was how this is only news because it happened either at or near Comic Con and the girl was wearing a costume. If this happened to just any girl anywhere not centered around a spotlighted event focused on a subculture it would not have this level of attention.

In some ways, those arguments have a point. These stories do make nerd culture look bad. If this was not Comic Con news, it never would have exploded on the internet the way it had. My dispute with the arguments I read in this vein were the subtle implications we should treat this like we always do.

I have a big problem with the way we handle abuse of all sorts in this country. Do not get me wrong, we are moving in a positive direction, but we are not at our destination. Not by a long shot. Just because we are better than we were does not mean we should not strive to be better than we are. We need to take every instance of abuse and shine a light on it. Bring it kicking and screaming out of the shadows so we can see all of its warts. We have to force ourselves to acknowledge the ugly sides of ourselves so we can do something about it.

I decided to share the news even if it was a hoax. If it was a hoax then I look stupid. Like that never happens. Good job internet person for making me look like an idiot. People may ignore my Facebook posts if I share enough hoaxes. I am fairly certain most people do not have time to read my posts and most of my blog views can probably be attributed to my roommate. The few that do read can decide for themselves if they want to share what I post or not. If it was not a hoax, then time was of the essence. She was at an international event where people were already spreading out to locations all around the world.

I do not know all the details. Suffice it to say, many people did bring out their flashlights. The police were able to apprehend a suspect at the hotel he was staying at. The suspect might have left the city before being taken into custody if a mother did not ask her daughter's friend to look to the internet for help. The internet responded as it usually does. With a mix of reactions that range from sickening to inspiring. There were enough people shining their little lights at once to where there were no shadows to hide in.

It does not end here. There is a girl in intensive care right now. My heart is with her right now as I am certain the hearts of others are as well. I do not even know this girl, but what she has gone through is something that absolutely no one should have to experience. This is a sickness that has the ability to find its way into any aspect of our society. It will continue as long as we let it. We should not fool ourselves into thinking we can stop looking for it because it returns when we stop looking.

I guess that is all for today's rant.

*flops off of his soap box*

Update 31 Jul 2014: Police have released some information. The injuries the girl suffered were consistent with a fall from a height of roughly six feet. The male suspect is still in custody.

http://www.polygon.com/2014/7/31/5957517/police-san-diego-comic-con-cosplayer-assault-investigation

Gender Swapping

There is a lot of discussion concerning people playing genders other than their own in games. Particularly video games when the player's own gender is available to them. It is a topic I have considered touching on in the past.

A recent article by Angela Murray on Gnome Stew about playing alternate genders in pen and paper roleplaying games made some good points and helped tip me over to typing out a blog post. I think her article raises some nice talking points especially concerning expectiations from others concerning playing a different gender in relation to playing other differences from those of the player. I won't touch on most of what she covered as I feel her article is worth a read, but I will brush against a couple of points she makes.

As far as pen and paper games go, I am more likely to play my own gender. I have played females and both are enjoyable. I would say the ratio of my male to female characters is somewhere around seven out of ten of them being male. The opposite is true in video games. The majority of my characters in video games are female. The ratio is higher than nine out of ten. In City of Heroes for instance I had over ninety characters (I deleted way more) and four of them were males. Even in Lord of the Rings Online my favourite Dwarf was named Deborah. For those unfamiliar with the game, there is no option for female Dwarves.

There are many flippant reasons people give. I for example oftentimes tell people it is cheaper than an operation. It still surprises me when some people that know me think I am being serious.

Many men joke around and say they play females in video games because it provides a better view. In some cases this is actually true. Females tend to be less broad so take up less screen realestate which is also one of the two reasons I tend to prefer shorter characters as well. Run animations being the other as characters tend to cover the same distance at the same speed and the taller they are the more it looks like they are running in slow motion, but that is a separate topic. My point here is there are advantages to being able to see around your character. I do not have a widescreen monitor, so the less space a character takes on my monitor the better.

Screen space is not my primary reason however. The evidence can be seen from when I was playing MUDs on a regular basis. I was closer to a fifty/fifty mix of active characters then. I did however spend more time playing the female characters.

When I play a character in any game, either in person or a digital format, I feel the need to act as the character would. People might start to begin to think of me as my character or my character as me. I am my own person separate from my characters, and they are their own individuals separate from me.

I find this separation is easier to do when face to face. Those games tend to last a few hours once or possibly twice a week at most. Those players get to see me outside of the character. It is easier to see where the character I play ends and I begin. There is a time when you are definitely in character, and there are times when you definitely are not. There is also time to interact with others under both circumstances.

This is harder for me when playing video games. People can easily spend twenty or more hours a week playing an MMO. That time is spent running around in the game in the skin of a character with no time spent for most people to get an opportunity to see you outside of your character(s). There is a huge difference between playing a character a few hours a week and getting to know the people behind the character ourside of the game itself, and playing a character in the same environment day in and day out. It is difficult to swing in and out of character when the situation does not shift between being in and out of character.

Because of this I feel I have to always be on when playing a male in a video game. There is this constant need on my part to play male characters so extreme there is no way other people could think that is how someone really is. My males in video games tend to become so extreme as to never be believable. I can not let off the throttle unless there is a chance for pure out of character interaction. This can be quite tiring both for myself and others.

I can relax and be myself when playing a female however because that level of separation does exist. It is generally easier for others to separate their concept of the character from their concept of the player when the gender is swapped in a video game. Sure, I have to remind people from time to time that I am male in order to keep that separation going in their mind, but it is easier to be myself and not have people think me and my character are the same person. Sometimes this is as simple as switching pronouns when acting as my character or speaking as myself. Other times it requires me to straight up tell someone again and again. I will sometimes forget to give reminders and it can become rather awkward because people will associate me with the character where with tabletop gaming it is more likely to have people associate the character with me. Even with reminders I still experience reactions in games when playing a female character that I have not as a male character, and never in a tabletop game, but I still get to be myself.

I am sorry there is no short, simple explanation outside of "I am more comfortable playing a female." That answer is very easy to interpret in termss other than how I mean it so is not the short answer I like to give so you get this novel instead.

Demystifying Disabilities

Non-hobby post incoming.

It has come to my attention that as a blogger that makes use of a mobility aid, a wheelchair in my case, I am obligated to blog about everything to do with disabilities. Normally, the topic of [Blank]ing with Disabilities is supposed to take over my blog completely. I am too lazy for that so you will get this one post for now. I may blog on something or other in relation to having a disability in the future, but feel that everyday life is a bit dull to be a regular part of the blog.

I guess the first thing you need to understand about people with disabilities is that we are all the same. There is nothing that separates us from one another just like all brown eyed people are exactly the same.

The second thing is we love to inspire people simply by virtue of our existence. It can be extremely flattering once we realize we motivate someone by no virtue of our own and doing nothing beyond trying to live a life.

Third, we are all sexually dysfunctional. Nothing down there works for any of us. Anybody that tells you differently is perpetuating a myth or lives in a fantasy world of their own creation. Males are incapable of achieving an erection and females never experience a real orgasm.

Fifth, disabilities should be overlooked or ignored. Just as with other burdens like alcoholism, we should just pretend disabilities are not there. A disability is not something to be worked on or kept in mind when associating with others on either side of the interaction.

Sixth, physical disabilities help hide the fact that there is always a mental condition as well. This means we are likely to be bad at simple things like counting.

Seventh, those of us in wheelchairs are amazing dancers with the besterest of moves. No joke.

Eighth, our disabilities define us, but are not a part of us. They influence no aspect of our lives yet encompass everything we are.

I hope this helps clear up any misconceptions our lessers may have concerning those of us living with disabilities.

Do We Need Feminism?

This is one of those more mature discussions. If you only come here for gaming or paint talk then you might want to skip this blog post. This post contains none of that though I am writing a follow up blog post right now that will contain hobby talk. This is my personal blog. There may be times I openly share things other people consider personal. This is one of those times. Some may also consider this post to be disturbing in nature. If you have any doubts, then please look at the tags before reading to see if you want to read on those topics or not. I am uncertain how else to preface this to warn people that might not want to read it.

There's an internet meme I see from time to time where males share a picture of themselves holding a sign with a pithy phrase along the lines of, "XXX is why I need feminism." The idea behind the meme is an interesting one that is clearly designed to grab attention, but does little to really get into the details of why these men feel the need to do this.

I grew up surrounded by women with the only men around being those I had seen in school which were few and far between from my scattered memory. Both my mother and step mother were strongly independent women that proved to me time and again that men were not needed. I never felt the desire to really get to know my father outside of a passing curiosity so never understood the need of other children for that connection. My sisters have all grown into radiant women I am intensely proud of. There are many good things I have learned being brought up in this manner.

One downside however was that I grew up feeling there was something fundamentally wrong with me. This was not the fault of any individual, but an accumulation of years upon years of never quite being as wholesome as the people around me. I came to believe there was something inherently evil about myself.

There came a point in my life when I spent some time with a person that grew up being abused. The fact she was a female was often times used as a focal point for that abuse. I had maleness directly pointed out to me as the cause of many of humanities troubles. I had never associated with other males outside of other children in a classroom setting so there were no examples of either good or bad men in my life for me to compare myself to. This individual still had a lot of hurt from growing up female, and events from her life as an adult did not help matters.

I came to believe that my sex was a problem. Not just for myself, but potentially for society in the future as well. I became extremely despondent as I could not think of a solution to the problem. Suicide was not an option because that would leave others to clean up my mess after me. Being male was my only option no matter how wrong it was.

We were talking one time and it was another discussion on how males cause many of society's problems. I sank further into myself so I would not have to face my own wrongness when she put a knife down in front of me. There was a solution. We talked for a long while after that. I did not even realize I had picked up the knife until she was taking it away from me. I had not yet earned the right to cleanse this evil from myself.

This happened on more than one occasion. Each time I would be talked into picking up that knife or a pair of scissors. Each time I would come away ashamed that I was still unworthy to remove this sin from my body. I truly did come to the point where I felt I would never be a whole individual as long as I had a penis. It was not a desire to be a female so much as it was a need to no longer be male.

A couple of years ago somebody posted a news article on some forums about a woman castrating her husband. I made an off colour comment about how all men deserved it at some point or another in their lives. It was not until people responded to that post that I began to realize that not everyone felt that castration was a viable option to the problem that is men. Not only that, but manhood in and of itself is not a sin.

Thankfully, I was amongst friends whom I was able to openly discuss things with so I could more easily understand where they were coming from. I went from childhood up into my thirties believing that castration was not only an option, but something to strive for and actively earn. I never truly realized how alone I was in feeling this way. I understood on an intellectual level that castration was illegal, but beneath the surface I still believed that all these men walking around were carrying the same shame I had for all those years. That is what being male meant to me.

There are many things that people never talk about. Most of them are uncomfortable topics. Some of them are so common that everybody assumes these things do not need to be talked about while others are so uncommon that most people never experience those things at all. If you never talk about these things then it is hard to know which is which so you can come to the assumption that something you take as common is an experience not shared by many. The inverse is true as well. Just because you are going through something does not mean you are experiencing it alone or that there is not somebody available to help. Find somebody, anybody to talk to about anything and everything. I did not even realize how deep my issues with my own sex went until it came out in the open.

I do not know what it is like to be a woman having never been one. I do know what it feels like to be made to feel like there is something innately wrong with yourself due to your sex. I also do not know if feminism is something the world needs or not. It is a step however, and we need to take steps to move away from where we are at. I definitely prefer feminism over standing still. If feminism makes it to where fewer people grow up feeling their sex is a vile thing to be ashamed of then I am for it.

Oh, and before it comes up, the person that intensified and focused my feelings on maleness being a blight upon the world was not a feminist. She was an abused individual that needed help and was reciprocating her experiences back into the world because it was all she knew. I can hardly blame her for amplifying my own feelings at the time.

Where's the Kibitz?

It has been a while since this blog has seen an update. If I had any readers I would hazard a guess they might be curious what has been causing my apparent inability to blog. In short – nothing.

I have already posted the last thing I have painted up on the blog. I have not picked up a paint brush since then. Sometimes I can paint, and sometimes I can not. The past couple of months has been one of those times when I have been unable to paint. I tried a few times, but I simply did not have the control in my hands that I require to paint miniatures. This does mean that all those models in my shame posts have been left virtually untouched along with Abuela Ortega and my Kanban board is frozen at the moment. This does not shame me like it did before. It's only shameful when I am capable of painting and I do not.

Obligatory gaming related picture to break up the text.

The last post also saw the start on discussion concerning an in store Fate RPG. This fell through. The reason I was going to run the game was because there were not enough GMs for all the players that want to play in store on Wednesday nights. This situation has changed since the question was first put to me however. After going in a few Wednesdays I realized there are now enough games to where they could comfortably spread six new players between the existing games while me pulling even three players from the other games would leave the existing games on the thin side.

I do not know where this leaves the blog. It really does not have an identity of its own outside of a place for me to put my thoughts. I keep considering posting some more serious topics, but I am uncertain if that is a direction I want to take the blog in or not. Right now my roommate is out of town with my camera so even if I do manage to paint something before she returns I will not be posting any pictures for now.

There is a new Warhammer Fantasy League firing up, but I do not think I will enter as it is a lot of models to lug around at the end. It takes me more than half an hour to pull 2500 points of Greenskins out of cases and set out on trays. Maybe if I actually get around to magnetizing all the bases. I kind of fell out of the Iron Kingdoms Escalation League. I had three months in a row where I failed to arrange to play a game with the people I was matched up for challenges, and the times I showed up for days I should have been able to get a pick up or checkmark game I would be the only Warmachine or Hordes player there. I am less worried about that with Warhammer Fantasy as I know I am practically guaranteed at least one Sunday a month to get a game or two in, but I am trying to decide if I want the hassle of transporting that many models or not.

So that is pretty much it. Like I said, nothing is going on, so there has been nothing to write about. I could always pick a topic and write away, but I am not certain I should. I would not expect another blog post for at least a couple more weeks and probably longer. Posting about paint jobs is sort of silly without images to illustrate what I am talking about. Pretty much the only other things I have been up to are daily routine stuff and playing World of Warcraft, Diablo III, Marvel Heroes, and Civilization V.