The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

There are threads on Talking Time which post random images, art, and whatnot, and I tend to check up on them whenever I’m bored, because they are normally laugh-inducing. There are countless great people on Talking Time with great tastes in such things. Every once and awhile, something less fun gets posted, sure, but it normally is fixed quickly, or scrolled past, and not really a big deal.

Last night, I decided to check the Random Image thread before bed, and I saw a horrific thing.

Now, I have seen some bad stuff on the internet. I mean, I run in furry circles. I like to think I can handle my gross, weird shit. But this picture… just… ugh. I’m sure as fuck not going to link you to it, but it’s apparently an older sort of meme where you take the super creepy mouths of Lampreys and photoshop them onto various body parts. The picture in question was on two fingers of a hand. It looked like those fingers had been frostbitten really badly, or something like that, and then hollowed out crudely with a knife or something. That’s the only attempt I’m going to make at describing it.

It made me physically ill. I felt like a complete wuss, but dammit, there was a bit after that where I really thought I was going to throw up. A link was given in the thread soon after for “context,” but it just led to other similar horrific pictures, and just made me feel worse. I posted about how bleh it made me feel, and then went to bed.

That should have been that, but dammit, that image has been stuck in my head. It keeps popping in here, and making me feel sick all over again. I can’t shake it. My fingertips will feel strange, like something is gnawing through them, and I know it’s because that stupid picture is on my mind and it’s playing tricks on my senses. Time and again, I am hit with flashes of it.

Again, I have seen so many terrible and disturbing pictures over the years. I can’t remember any of them sticking with me like this. Moments of being disturbed, sure, but they didn’t bring the feeling back again and again when my mind wandered to them like this picture does.

Just… fuck. I hope writing about it gets it out of my head once and for all. A silly hope, but dammit. Just… dammit.

Yesterday was a shitty day. There were some non-shitty bits, caused by the awesome people I have in my life, but mostly shitty ones. As I write this, it’s still going similarly. I’m frustrated and tired and unhappy, and I have to write a blog post.

Well then.

For all the crazy-ass stuff I am doing with my life, transitioning at all, I will have to say that I’ve never really felt like a freak. I can pinpoint two moments when I felt this way. The first was when I dressed in front of Natalie for the first time. That went really badly for both of us, and I cried for a long, long while.

Let’s just say the second thing happened today, when I was attempting to do research based on suggestions from my psychologist. I can’t remember a time I have felt more like a fake, a liar, and a failure than when I was looking for fake breasts to wear, and how to determine what kind of buy. The idea that I would be wearing that sort of thing every day, that I’d have to wake up in the morning and deal with that? That crushed me. Seriously crushed me. I’m trying to be myself, not trade one fake persona for another. That’s the whole point I’m spending all this money, and time, and effort. That’s why I am trying so damn hard at this. To be myself. Not some fake person. Me.
I could not imagine something that would make me feel more fake than that.

So I’m mad at the world. I’m mad at my psychologist for making no sense to me and actively putting me down instead of helping me. I’m mad that I’m in this stupid position where I have to prove I can be someone I’m not before they let me be the person I am. I’m mad at waiting. I’m mad at life, and I’m tired to waiting for it to start.

Fuck you, world. Fuck you, life. I’m done with this bullshit. Do you hear me? I am done with this bullshit. I’m me, and you can’t fucking stop me.

Here’s a lesson: if you ever want things to not change, never do mental math.
Basically, a little while ago, I did some mental math at how much I was spending on energy drinks in a month, just because I was wondering. I then went, “Well, shit,” and haven’t bought one since because, dammit, it was a significant amount I was spending on something not that good for me.

Of course, now, I am in the middle of caffeine withdrawal and I am not feeling great! Still, I have extra money to waste on completely different random crap, so that’s nice.

This reminded me of when I quit WoW. All I did was do a mental calculation on how much I had spent on the game and went, “Oh,” and immediately quit. When I got the whole cost laid out before me, it was easy to see that I was keeping myself from enjoying a variety of games at the cost of a game I only played off and on. It wasn’t that I wasn’t enjoying WoW, it was just that the opportunity cost was a bit high when I looked at it overall. Same with these energy drinks, I suppose.

I do wonder why I didn’t try to stop this sooner. It’s really a lot about habit. I got into the habit of buying an energy drink on the way to work every night. Besides feeling a bit sick right now, the worst part of deciding not to get them anymore was having to break my habit. I love habits, and it’s frustrating to break them. Still, it’s probably for the best. It’s just tough, as habits are my little reminders that everything is okay in life, and nothing is going wrong.
I just have to tell myself everything is alright, and nothing is going wrong, instead.

Before the end of the semester, I have to submit a bunch more stories to magazines and stuff as part of my independent study thing. Now, one might think that I would be pumped or at least not really stressed by the idea of doing this, seeing as I just got a short story accepted somewhere and thus am obviously an author worth publishing, in theory. Really, the exact opposite is true. I am dreading it.

I feel like I’m in the unfortunate place of knowing too much, but not having the experience of knowing how to use it. I’ve been on the receiving end of creative submissions at the press. I’ve seen the mistakes and I’ve seen how I react to what people send in that is just not good or really stupidly formatted. I know how important it is to follow guidelines and do things the right way if I want to be taken seriously as a professional. Let’s face it, if there’s one thing I want to feel like when I send this stuff out there, it’s like a professional writer. That’s all one gets out of it. I don’t want to seem like an amateurish dolt, or someone so full of themselves that they are too annoying to publish. I want to do this shit right, if I’m going to do it.

What should be a fairly simple affair of slapping together a cover letter, changing the formatting on a word document, and sending stuff out becomes a really stressful event for me. I pour over the guidelines and quadruple check everything, and even then worry that I’m misunderstanding them. Is this piece right for here? Am I understanding what they want? I recheck the spelling on my cover letter over and over, wanting to make sure it doesn’t sound stupid. I get obsessed that there must be something I’m missing, something that’s going to reflect really poorly on me, and make me come across as someone who is wasting these fine people’s time. I don’t want to be a waste of time. Even if my stories aren’t the right stories for them, I want the whole transaction to be smooth, and fun. But to do that, everything needs to be right. I worry and worry and when I finally send it out it’s like I’m gasping for breath, recovering from terror.

Then I have to search for another magazine to submit to and start the process all over.

Yeah, not looking forward to getting that done. It’ll be good that I did, but goodness. I hope I can keep my worry under control. When it gets out, it really goes ballistic.

I almost wrote “Merry Oviposition Appreciation Day” on the workload planner at work, but realized that was a terrible idea for many different reasons, such as me having to explain what the hell that meant, and so I didn’t. True story.

I am really lame sometimes.

In any case, it’s Easter, a day of bunny rabbits, for some reason, as well as a guy named Jesus. I heard he was a cool dude.

I must admit, though, that Easter has lost most meaning for me. It’s a great reason to rock out to Jesus Christ Superstar, and really, a reason to do that is fantastic, and it’s a great reason to buy a bunch of cheap candy the next week and get one day off of school. As I think I’ve said before, it’s always nice to have a reason to eat a nice meal with the family. But it just… doesn’t have significance.

I wonder if it feels big to people who have more faith in this stuff. It’s supposedly the huge event of the religious year, but it still almost seems like that day is really Christmas, because there’s so much more, socially, around that.

I suppose there’s no reason to really wonder about it. To me, it’ll just be a fairly kickass Sunday, where I will spend time with my family and do some serious viewing of the new Doctor Who premier and, frankly, that’s enough for me. Still, I hope however your Easter goes, that it’s super neat.

You know what I need to do? I need to enjoy my successes.

I got an acceptance email from a lit mag today, saying that my short story, “Downsizing,” has been accepted for publication there.

That’s top of cool, isn’t it?

At the same time, I didn’t really jump up and down. I told everyone because that’s what I’m supposed to do, you know? In the same way, I succeeded at this because that’s what’s supposed to happen. I’m supposed to write things, and submit them, and get them published.

Basically, this is, like, the stupidest way to think about things ever, and I do it all the time.

I don’t know why my instant reaction to being successful is to undercut my success and attempt to make it meaningless. When amazing, awesome victory is merely “adequate,” it’s hard to take joy in anything. But this is really cool. This is like, the first time a serious publication has picked up my work. This is a thing that I should be proud of, and I’m letting my stupid brain stop me from being proud.

So fuck that, I am proud. I did it. Me. I win at writing, and will continue to win.
I’m cool.

I wonder where the luck/strategy threshold is for Essner.

So we played Acquire this evening, a game which has a strong random element to it. You draw tiles from a box that you can play on the board. Knowing what kind of connections you can make with tiles and guessing what various hotels your opponents are investing in are important to the game. When you know this, you’ll know what is going to buy out what, and thus what to invest in. Of course, you only know the moves possible from your hand. You don’t know what everyone else is drawing.

Essner seems to think this creates a game where there is no strategy to the moves and decisions you make, and someone just randomly wins. While luck does play a huge part, the idea that it’s only luck is verifiable as not true, which I think he would admit. It doesn’t change his gut reaction to the game, though, which is perfectly fair. A lot of the game can feel really random.

I just wonder where the line is for that kind of reaction, though. I mean, this is a guy who loves to play those coin push machines, and I feel like that’s almost completely random. Does he agree? Does he think there’s some small element of strategy in playing those games? I can’t speak for him, so I’m not sure. We play stuff like Magic, which has an obvious random element in card drawing, and other games with dice rolls and things of that nature, and he doesn’t really seem to think those are luck based, even though he always critically misses.

I don’t mean to pick on Essner. The other people I know who don’t like Acquire have the exact same feeling about it. I just wonder what it is about how the game goes that causes it to feel that way. Is it simply because you have to hedge your bets against many possible futures, and try to set up a situation where you can capitalize on most of them, as opposed to dealing with one threat in front of you?

This is what I am thinking about as I head to bed. What do you think of Acquire?

I remember when I was young, and we had Comedy Central. Late at night, at the crazy late time of midnight, they would show Mystery Science Theater 3000. It was a magical show, and I remember trying, each and every time when I didn’t have to get up early the next day, to stay up and watch it. Almost always I would fail, but those times when I didn’t were the best times. True comedy times.

Now I live in an age where I would say that the majority of my non-video game entertainment, and significant amount of my entertainment overall is based in watching things that have taken this general format and ran with it. Stuff like Spoony, the many, many LPs I watch, and so on, are all comedy similar to that which I tried my hardest to get to see over and over again. Still, I guess I wonder why I gravitate to spending my time on that, when so many other avenues of amazing entertainment are out there. I’m behind on Community, 30 Rock, and Archer. I hear Important Things is on Netflix streaming now. So many things I could be watching. Yet this is what I spend my time on.

Here’s my current theory: it turns viewing into a pseudo-social experience. Now, that seems kind of potentially depressing, that I’d be replacing the people commentating in these videos for “real friends,” but it’s kind of true. I never see films alone, nor do I want to. I never watch TV shows unless I’m watching them with people, really. If I’m turning a television on, it’s because I need inoffensive background noise, I’m going to play a game on that television, or I’m watching something with someone. I don’t really watch things on my own. It’s slowly gotten to the point where it just doesn’t fit with how I go about doing things.
So I watch Let’s Plays were I have commentators “watching” with me and cracking jokes, adding to the experience. And I sit there, enjoying their humor, obviously, but also thinking about what they’re missing, reacting accordingly, and so on. It gives me the extra level of interaction I have sitting around doing something with my friends, but I can have it when my friends are busy or otherwise indisposed.

Did I manage to write that in a way that didn’t sound lame? I don’t feel like it’s lame. I feel like it makes sense. I watch things because I want to have the social interaction around watching something, whether it be discussing an episode over dinner or whatever. These sorts of internet entertainment let me have that in one complete package when I can’t figure out how to make schedules work.
And hey, if you have a better explanation, I’d love to hear it.

Today, my mother asked about buying a 360 for her TV downstairs.

I thought this was a bit silly, but I told her the price. She didn’t feel like it was worth 200 dollars. When I asked her why she wanted one, it was so she could play games. Well, hey, that seems like the reason one would get a 360. Of course, the games she wanted to play was trivia stuff like You Don’t Know Jack and whatnot. She wants to be able to play with Dad without bothering me, which is nice of her, of course. It’s not a great idea. She doesn’t trust herself with a 360 controller at all, so I don’t know what she’d do with actually owning a system. But it’s kind of cool she wanted to.
I followed this up by showing her the new Jack on my iPad and some of the funny Portal 2 videos that have been going around. I was showing her what was going on in gaming, and she seemed relevantly interested.

It’s kind of amazing to me that trivia has basically made my mother respect one of my biggest past-times. She doesn’t understand most of what I do, of course, but she gets the appeal of having everyone over to play Jack, or Buzz, or Scene It!. She wants to play these games, and even though it’s normally a huge hassle for me (she’ll only play them downstairs, so I have to unhook all my systems and carry them downstairs and hook them up there and such, which would be less of a problem except I am also forced to hide all the cables, making it hard to adjust things, but oh well) I always go ahead and do it because I love having her, and dad, and everyone involved. It feels awesome, and it’s a lot of fun. It worked with Dad and Golf, and it works with my mother and trivia.

Similarly, giving my mother a good, working laptop has done wonders for her understanding why I am on the internet all day. She gets as stressed as I do when the internet doesn’t work nowadays. She is on there, watching videos, reading news, or playing games on Yahoo games basically every night. She understands it, and doesn’t fight with me about being connected anymore.

For so long, I wished she would just leave me alone, or try to understand why I enjoy what I enjoy. It always seemed to hypocritical that she’d tell me I needed to not play games the whole night when she’d spend the whole night watching television. Finally, I have that understanding, at least with this stuff, and that’s pretty neat. Gives me hope for other things.

Flock sent me an e-mail today, telling me of it’s death.

Right around the time I fell in love with having two monitors, I heard about Flock. Originally a fork of Firefox, and eventually a fork of Chrome (and changing right around the time I changed over myself, like it loved me), Flock was supposed to be a “social web browser.” It originally drew me in with its interesting bookmark integration and built-in blogging software, and soon became my main browser, with Firefox, and eventually Chrome, sitting on my second monitor for opening links people sent me in chat and whatnot. It was built upon the solid innards of the more popular browsers, but it was something unique, and something mine. It worked well, and I enjoyed it. Even after Chrome appeared as a fantastic second browser to Firefox, I found myself ending up booting Firefox 3 to the curb instead, and sticking with Flock.

Alas, I should have guessed this day would come. As much as I loved Flock, it really didn’t offer anything that Firefox with three or four plugins didn’t have. Nobody was going to pile onto it. It couldn’t be worth the money to keep developing and updating. I’m not surprised they’re closing up shop, but I am sad to lose it.
I guess I have a little Indie Rock Pete in me, as I really did enjoy using a browser that was capable, but unknown. It was my special portal to the internet, that only I used. I don’t think I ever met anyone else that knew about it. It didn’t have the stigma of something like Opera, and it was not as complete bullshit as Safari or IE. It was totally mine. It has a special place in my heart because of that.

I installed Firefox 4 today to replace it. It looks a lot better than 3 was, and once I installed a plugin to make the address bar like Chrome (I can’t live without searching in the address bar anymore. It immediately pissed me off and I immediately started searching for plugins.), it seems like it will serve me well. Still, I already miss the way Flock would, very slightly, misrender my website, and the way it would fake out not saving my open tabs on a crash, then suddenly restore them. God speed, little browser. Rest in peace.