The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

Hello! I wrote another thing! Can you believe this shit? Me writing a thing? I mean, seriously. This one is about a My Little Pony fan horror game. I couldn’t resist a little trolling, so to speak, but for some reason they actually let me do it. So, uh, you know. Take a look at it here.

One more article and then all my articles are done! Whew! How they were set in the timeline just made them all kind of naturally bunch up, I suppose. Anyway, one last one tomorrow, and it’s kind of the one I feel the most like… well, it’s the game I really want people to know about and try that they may not have tried, I’ll say that. See you tomorrow for another one of these silly little posts reminding you about it!

Hey, look, more self promotion! And there’s going to be more for like two more days, so, you know, sorry about that. Anyway, that podcast I recorded with the On The Stick guys is up, and over here. I’d hope you’d be listening to it anyway, because I’d hope you’re a fan of their podcast. I’m always really entertained by it when I listen, and I’m lucky enough to know all of them, you know?

I listened to some of it so far, and my voice wasn’t TOO terrible. I can almost listen to it now. Not that I sound great. But that’s really more my holdup. I’m sure you’ll not have any problems with it. Or if you do, tell me so I can despair about it for weeks or whatever. Heh.

In any case, I hope you enjoy. Tell me what you think, sarcasm about my voice aside! And hey, two more articles coming from me in the next two days. So, uh, look forward to two more posts like this. I hope this glut of content from me is a boon and not just something weird. Yep!

I’ve been such a good girl today, doing all my grading, that I totally forgot to post this. So I’m posting it now!

My article on Atom Zombie Smasher is now up on Onthestick.com. It’s not a video game like the last time or anything, but, you know, apparently it’s pretty decent? So please do go check it out.

And again, if you haven’t been keeping up with all the articles, give them a read too, okay? I’ve got a lot of mine coming up in the next day or two, but there’s so much good stuff going up!

Okay, back to work. See you later, blog!

I make no secret of the fact that I’m a furry. I mean, just look at the goddamn header. It’s something I identify with, like, and support. Some of the most awesome friends I’ve had are furries, or, well, sort of self-proclaimed “former furries,” and I feel like one of the main reasons why we all get along so well, and we’re all so awesome, is because of this sort of general attitude of acceptance and celebration of what we love, regardless of how silly it is, that the fandom is full of. Just like any group of people out there, there are plenty who take things too far, or who are total dicks, and whom I generally want to slap and tell to grow up. But so many are just awesome people, and I love them to death. Friendship-wise, I mean. Besides the boyfriend. And maybe a former lover or two I’m still really close to. Heh.

I guess I worry, though, that being in this insular community where everyone is cool with everything changes your perspective. It makes me wonder if that’s a bad thing. It makes me wonder where the “normal” perspective is, and if knowing that and maintaining that actually has any value. It makes me wonder if a “normal” perspective is naturally bad for people, and that by trying to adhere to it, I’m just making things shitty for others. I wonder.

Anyway, I’m going to talk about a thing and the people involved in that thing, which I won’t name, might see it. If you are one of them, I hope it doesn’t seem passive-aggressive, because that is not my intent. I know saying that makes it seem MORE like my intent, but seriously, I don’t mean for it to. It just put me in a weird head space, and when I get in a weird head space, I need to write it out to figure it out. So here I am.

I have a bunch of furry friends who are going to a convention soon. I’m super pumped for them as they’ve known each other and been close way longer than I have known them (they were nice enough to try to involve me in their pony watching nights, which I gladly joined and got to know them from) and this is, from what I understand, the first time most of them will all be the in same physical location at the same time, which is super thrilling. Recently, though, they were talking about the more… mature things they were planning to get up to at the con in detail on twitter. Because I follow them all, I could see all the @ replies back and forth and see the whole conversation. It really struck me as… weird?

I’m no prude or anything. They’re all awesome people, and adults, and they can have fun any damn way they’re comfortable with and I will shake my pom-poms and cheer them on. And a lot of their discussion was talking about being safe, and what’s acceptable and what isn’t, which are conversations that totally should happen in such a situation. That’s healthy. That’s cool. But it was in a public forum, you know? They weren’t writing pornography or anything, but they were being very open about their sex lives, likes, and dislikes in a public forum. They were making plans. It just seemed really inappropriate to me.

Then I realized almost all of them had their accounts locked, so nobody could see it except people they approved and they weren’t just yelling all this stuff in public, and I calmed down a little. I mean, if we were all in a chat room and they were discussing this, I wouldn’t be freaked out. Since they were all locked up, this was the same way. I just didn’t realize it to begin with, because I just kind of assume everything on twitter is out there for everyone to see. That’s how I run my account, anyway. I was weirded out over literally nothing. But it just kind of got me thinking about why I felt that sort of thing should be done behind closed doors, right? Why did I think it was inappropriate when I thought they were talking about that in public?

When I first was trying to transition, my mother tried to shame me into not doing it because “that sort of thing should happen behind closed doors.” She was wrong there, for many reasons, and I’m not shy about being who I am. But at the same time, I wouldn’t talk about what I actually do and actually like, except in maybe the vaguest of terms, on here, or in public. If I like you and you want to ask me, fuck yes, we can sit down and talk about it, but I’m going to keep that stuff quiet or at least not in your face.

In a similar way to how me being female is way way more than how I prefer things in the bedroom, though, a lot of people take other things of that nature to be a core part of who they are. People live extremely BDSM Master/Slave sort of lifestyles, for example, and that’s awesome for them. Yet that’s kind of awkward to talk about in public. I don’t know if I’d be comfortable with people casually mentioning that. Same thing with being poly. I mean, I did that, and I wasn’t going to deny I was dating multiple people? But I still didn’t explain the fact that I had multiple boyfriends except when it was necessary to, or someone asked me. It seemed inappropriate to go about yelling that. But there are people for whom that is a serious way of life. It’s who they are, and their little family is important to them. I wouldn’t want them to feel like they couldn’t discuss their family. I wouldn’t want them to feel like they can’t mention all the nice things they do together. But it would make me feel weird if they drew a lot of attention to it.

I guess I’m just wondering where that comes from. Is it “normal” to keep that stuff hush hush? And is that actually important? I do pretty well believe that not being able to talk about a thing just makes it kind of… evil in public opinion. It makes it a point of shame, whether or not you really feel like it is. Look at the history of homosexuality as a thing. It used to be something to be ashamed of, to hide away, but nowadays it’s out there from people mentioning it, even though others thought it was awkward, and now it’s just a thing. It being just a thing is clearly better. People can be who they are, and not be ashamed about it, all because the community was not willing to conform to how society expected them to treat who they were attracted to. As a transgirl, I don’t want to be outed to random people, so I don’t talk about my past, and that makes my past a thing to be ashamed of, even though I don’t really believe that it is. I’m not ashamed of being an Eagle Scout, for example, but I could never mention that to my students or people I work with, because I would be goddamn terrified of what they’d then think of me. How is that different from actually being ashamed of it? It’s not really that different at all. I can fully admit that, in a lot of ways, it would probably be better if I just wore that stuff on my sleeve. So I guess I don’t know why I should feel odd about people treating their sex lives as something to get out there and be part of who you are, because fuck, it ISN’T something to be ashamed of. As long as it’s between consenting adults and nobody is getting hurt (or at least not seriously hurt. Pain can be fun) then rock the fuck on. Enjoy yourself!

But there’s just this politeness element to it, as well as a focus element. It’s not expected for someone to reveal this stuff, and it can throw them off their game. You can’t know if someone won’t be offended, and that sort of thing can turn a boring conversation into a fight, which is something that, in society, you’re just not supposed to do, you know? Similarly, it can quickly derail whatever is going on. Going back to the Eagle Scout and students example, I know that mentioning that would completely derail the entire class period into me having to explain so much about both myself, and my dysphoria, and everything. The class work wouldn’t get done. So you just avoid that stuff. You avoid rocking the boat, and you move through life. You’re SUPPOSED to. It’s how society works, and how things get done. I want to work together well with everybody. I don’t start fights, or even the vague potential for fights, if I can help it.

I just wonder if that’s really alright, though. I guess I wish the world worked differently. I wish one could just be who they are without having to fight for it. I know the world will never work that way unless people are willing to get out there and show how stupid these barriers are. Yet I still, automatically on a gut level, work to protect those barriers, and keep them intact. I really wonder why I do that. I really wonder if I’m part of the problem. I really wonder if I’m somehow failing everyone else in a similar situation as me by not being willing to be honest. I wonder.

Spec Ops: The Line is kind of boring as shit until it’s not, and then you’re glad that the rest is boring as shit because it all kind of makes a clear statement, and fuck, games don’t do that enough.

The reason to play this game is the plot, and so I am going to spoil the shit out of it because I want to talk about it and dammit, I will. Don’t read this if you haven’t played it. Just go play it. Seriously. It’s already pretty cheap. I bought a copy for CJ for 6 bucks. Play it and enjoy it. If you can enjoy a 3rd Person Cover Shooter, and like games that try new things, it is clearly worth your time, okay?

Anyway, spoilers ahoy from here on in, alright? Seriously, don’t read all this until you’ve beat the game.

I’m serious.

We good now?

Okay.

The opening of this game could not be more generic. It’s like… painfully generic. Like, if you imagined what some movie person who doesn’t understand video games would imagine as a video game, it would kind of be that. It just has so little going on, besides sandstorms, I guess? You shoot guys, and you move on, and you do “good” stuff. It’s very mindless.

Slowly, though, it starts to become less so. Your character and team get really fucked up and injured. They look bad. It’s clear this mission has had lasting effects on them. There’s inter-squad fights about really serious things. The game, slowly, starts asking you to make choices that really do affect how encounters play out and how you feel about yourself. Very quickly, the simple plot starts seeming much less white, and a lot more grey. Even what the characters say in the game gets all broken up and messed up. They go from calm, cool “Tango Downs” and whatnot to screaming obscenities when they’re hit and yelling in frustration “Tango Finally Fucking Goddamn Down!” as they face more and more dudes. It’s really quite effective in showing that hey, what’s going on is not cool.

The real genius of the game, I think, are the loading screen messages. They get so goddamn awesome. Most of the loading screen messages are your normal stuff. “Hit A to get in cover” and so on. You know, tooltips. But some of them are comments on the plot. “You need to get to the Nest to find out what’s happening.” However, as you get deeper into the story, those messages get really fucked up. The first one I saw was “You are still a good person.” I laughed, to be honest, but I was wowed. From there, they just kept coming. “If Ludo were still alive, he would probably be facing PTSD for the rest of his life so, you know, he got off easy.” “The rules of the US Military state that you are not allowed to shoot unarmed combatants, but this is a game, so who fucking cares.” They so reflect how crazy the game is getting, and also give you a kind of strange insight into where your character’s mindspace is. It breaks the fourth wall very clearly, but it does so very well.

In the end, the game is very much a critique of military shooter games. It makes a clear statement on how little they actually show the horrors of war, and how incredibly abstracted a game is from the reality of being in a warzone and having to do awful things to survive. For example, the sequence when you’re firing the mortar that is a clear critique of the sequence in CoD4 where you shoot the airplane gun at the little blips is one of the clearest callouts of this. The minigame you play shooting it is so abstract, but then it makes you walk through the devestation and see that, no, you weren’t shooting little blips. You were shooting people. War is not a fun game.

That message stuck with me. It’s not about to make me stop playing silly fantasy shoot dudes games, perse. But it really brought their inherent ridiculousness to light, and said, “Realize what this is trivializing.” I really appreciated that. It said something. Games really don’t do that enough.

Okay, blog, I’m going to vent a bit for now. Sorry.

I wish I knew what was up with me.

For like, forever, when I was younger, I was miserable. I basically spent all my free time thinking about how to kill myself, and had to force myself to do things like have fun with my friends, go to class, or whatever. It really fucking sucked. So I got me some therapy and transitioned and then I felt no less than tons better? Seriously, it was like “Oh, this is what being happy is.” It was pretty great!

But seriously, the last few weeks, I’ve been falling back to where I was. I’ve started thinking about killing myself again on a fairly regular basis. (I never will. I’m not an idiot and I’m not about to hurt my loved ones with something so selfish, but goddamn, do I have some specific fantasies about it.) I’ve started mumbling to myself again constantly about what a waste of space I am and how much of a disappointment I’ve become. I constantly wake up in the middle of the night in panic states. It’s been pretty shitty!

I’m really not sure what has changed. Granted, I do have a lot of classes on my plate, and I am doing quite a bit of work. But it’s not like I haven’t taken breaks when I needed them, and it’s not like I’m not keeping up with everything I need to do. (I could be BETTER, certainly. I could be grading all my papers the night I get them or something insane. Overall, though, I haven’t done anything that I would even remotely consider a problem or something to worry about yet.) I’ve still got an awesome boyfriend and a super cool puppy dog who loves me. I get to do cool shit. While I worry a bit about money, I know that, overall, I’m not anywhere near screwed.

Yet it’s just oppressing. I know I used to get things done while feeling like this, but I’ve been WITHOUT these feelings for so long, I feel like I’ve kind of forgotten how to function when I feel like this, too.

Last night, we all went out to eat for my mom’s birthday, and my Grandma, as I was hugging her before she left, said “You’re a good man.” As soon as I was out of the family zone, I lost it. I cried. I’ve felt like a lot of shit ever since. Like sick to my stomach worked up. It just… bleh. My psychologist and I had a talk recently about how big things take a long time to percolate. Basically, she was saying it wasn’t dumb that I was still freaking out about this stuff, even though I felt frustrated to be having these sorts of feelings again. This is probably the biggest goddamn thing in my life. It’s not just going to disappear. That dysphoria is going to come back. It’s natural for it to.

It just really fucking sucks.

Anyway, there, some venting. I’m done.

Hi, everyone!

Getting to work was only a complete nightmare, but my first article for On The Stick’s 31 More Days of Horror Games is up. It’s about Anchorhead, and you can find it here. It’s a silly little interactive fiction game! Hopefully you find it fun.

Whew. Now I’m going to bed. That took several hours more fucking around than I expected it to.

Hi, blog. What’s up? That’s cool, that’s cool. Let’s do a complicated handshake, as one does with their blog, and then get down to business.

October is an exciting month on Onthestick.com because it involves a lot of me. (Apparently I am self-centered now.) Okay, that’s not true. They’re always doing great stuff. It’s always a great month! I love their podcast and the rest of the stuff they do is just as solid, totally. But this month, they’re going above and beyond for another October.

Anyway, you may remember that last year, I contributed to their 31 Days of Horror Games thing with an article about Silent Hill 2. That was a lot of fun, and there were tons of great articles besides mine. I hope you checked them out. Well, they’re doing it again! With all new games! It’s going to be just as awesome, if not more so.

I had so much fun writing that last time, and I have so much less free time now that I’m teaching full time in which to write articles for fun, that I decided that I’d write four articles for this year. I am a time management genius. Look for those in the coming weeks. I’m sure I’ll call them all out on here specifically, though. I also recorded a podcast with all the On The Stick guys that went pretty well, I think. They said they’d have me back, anyway. So look forward to that this month as well.

But while you’re waiting, I do hope you’ll check out all the other articles. There’s one every day, and they’ve got all kinds of guest writers, not just me, in to do all sorts of weird games. So give that a read if you’re bored, okay? Onthestick.com is still the website. Just as a reminder. Onthestick.com.

Alright. That’s enough blogging for now. Have a spoooooky October! ooooOOOOOOOOoooooh. (Okay, that was a bit much.)

I constantly refer to myself as a child in front of my boyfriend. I talk to him about my child stomach that makes it impossible for me to eat a big meal anymore, or how I’m going to go buy this because I am six years old, and so on. It’s just me making fun of my passions and stuff, and that’s fine. It’s a thing. I’m sure as fuck not embarrassed that I spend my free time watching cartoons, and surround myself with plastic ponies and other toys from said cartoons. I’m not going to apologize for 100% buying into the whole Skylander thing, or only wearing t-shirts with cute animals on it. We all have stupid stuff we love. It’s nothing to be embarrassed about. But goodness, I don’t know. The deeper I go, the more I wonder if I should be concerned.

If you haven’t heard, my family and I are going to Disney World soon. I think in January (!!!). I could seriously not be more excited about this. I haven’t been to Disney World in years, over a decade, and to go and share it with someone I really, really love, is just… well, I’m excited. I think it’ll be fun as shit and romantic and a great time, and I am so pumped I have been listening to Disney World Background Music and shit for weeks now. (The music has made me tear up a few times. How sad is that?)

I had a disagreement with a friend over whether or not Disney World was “romantic.” I think it is. There will be lots of fine dining, and it’s such an overwhelming, awesome place that you want to share with someone you’re close to, you know? That’s what I said. But the more I thought about it, the more maybe that is kind of weird. Maybe it’s strange that I attach childhood so strongly with notions of romance, happiness, and other such positive emotions. And that made me think about… well… everything I do. I started trying to take an objective look at everything I am doing right now. What I enjoy and what my focuses are… everything, you know?

It just kind of shocked me to see how much of my life is focused around reclaiming my childhood. Now, don’t get me wrong. I had a really nice childhood. If I could make that childhood go away, I probably wouldn’t agree to it. I did so many awesome things, made so many awesome friends, and grew up to be, if I can say so, a fucking awesome person. But… it was wrong, you know? I wasn’t myself. I was pretending to be another person, at least slightly, for a whole lot of it. I couldn’t do a lot of things I wanted to do. I couldn’t ask for a lot of things I wanted to have. It was… different than it would have been had I been myself.

I look at what I’m doing now, and I see me finding replacements. I’m watching shows I probably would have felt pressure not to watch. I’m collecting things I probably wouldn’t have had back then, which is driven home every time someone asks me if I had My Little Ponies as a kid and I tell them no. I’m shying away from more “adult” entertainment, such as the dramas that CJ likes to watch. Hell, I’m teaching at the place I went to college, but as myself now, trying to reclaim THAT. I wanted so badly to swim again, because that’s something I used to love to do as a kid, and I wanted to do it with me being right. When I did, I laughed, acted like an idiot, and splashed about in the kiddie area for a lot of the time, totally embarrassing CJ. And now I want to go to Disney World, and reclaim those memories with me being myself as well.

I guess I just don’t know if all that is healthy. A lot of this stuff wasn’t a decision I made because I had some plan to get my childhood back. It’s just shit I want to do. I want to watch Gravity Falls, Mystery Incorporated, and so on, you know? I’m not planning some stupid takeover of my past. But that’s really kind of what it is, isn’t it? I really don’t know if I should be trying to cut that stuff back or not. I doubt I will without pressure, though. I do things I want to do. I’ll go to Disney World and run around and laugh and be a silly little kid with my boyfriend, and that’ll be great. Hopefully he won’t be too embarrassed with me.

Holy shit, a blog post? Dang, yo.

I started following this awesome person on twitter recently. I kept seeing retweets from them and they were really funny, a friend of a friend I guessed, and when I looked at their timeline most of what they were saying made me smile. So, you know, creepy stalker activate. I turn to twitter to be entertained just as much as informed and connected so, you know, why not?

Then this person started talking about serious life shit, and that threw me for a loop. Not a bad one, perse. I’m not frustrated I followed them? But damn, I’ve really been doing a lot of thinking.

Basically, this person is bigendered (which is why I’m desperately avoiding pronouns here. I can’t say I know what the proper protocol is for pronouns for people like that. Do I use one of those silly hybrid pronouns like shi? If it was me, I’d feel like I’d want he or she as the situation demanded, which is kind of an impossible thing to ask of people, but…) and that is just… damn. Seriously. It’s something I thought I understood. I have a real good friend I’ve known for a long time who is bigendered, and for a long time my psychologist thought I was bigendered because I’m such a tomboy and was trying to rule it out, though obviously that’s not the case and she eventually figured that out. Being trans, I just kind of took for granted that I understood this whole gender dysphoria thing, and I had this.

But listening to this person talk, Jesus fuck, I thought I had it bad, but my heart aches when confronted with the serious issues this person is having to deal with. It quickly occurred to me that I never really spent a lot of time thinking about what someone like that would be going through. At least my problems had a solution. I felt like shit, but there was a goal I could work towards, and eventually I did, and my life got infinitely better for it. There’s no good solution that I can construct even in my wildest dreams for being bigendered. Maybe I’m missing something, but I really can’t. Because you’re both genders, and you may flip between feeling more male or more female just about any time, there’s no out. Something about your body is always going to be wrong sometimes. You could transition, but then you don’t have access to the gender you were before, which you also are, so it’s just cutting off one thing to spite another. I suppose you could try to be extremely androgynous, and dress more masculine and more feminine as your mood demands, but that still creates awkward situations with people you interact with often, who are clearly going to decide you’re one or the other, no matter how you dress. No matter which way you go, you’re going to run into that dysphoric depression that I fought for so long and made me want to die most days. It… goddamn.

In thinking about all this, I totally crazily apologized for imagined slights to the friend I referred to earlier, who was very awesome and was like, “Darling, when I’m talking to you, that’s one of the few times I feel like I can truly be myself, guy or girl. So you don’t need to worry about all that.” Which was nice to hear, and I appreciated it. I hope that’s how my friend really feels about it all. I’m going to keep doing my best to be there, of course.

But I wish I could say something worthwhile, extend some sort of support, to this person on twitter. But I’m a complete fucking stranger, and that’s creepy, right? There’s few things more personal than this stuff, and I just want to step in and talk about it out of nowhere. Every time I try to think of something to say, it comes off sounding so hollow in my head that I can’t say it. So I wrote this blog instead, I guess.