Pulling the Plug

I don't know if anyone still reads this thing, but I am thinking of quitting.  My writing has been the most sporadic since I started this thing, despite almost my almost universal access to the web.  It's not that I don't have anything else to say; it's just that I don't know if anyone is reading the blog.  My last few posts generated a little feedback on Facebook, and a few of them have picked up +1s from Google+, but I don't think anyone is reading the actual blog.  I haven't fielded a single comment all year, and that hurts.

I realize that I began this blog as yet another trans blog (did you know there is an actual Yet Another Trans Girl Blog out there?) in a crowd that was already jam-packed.  Starting a blog was not the wellspring of inspiration I thought it would be.  I thought that having an outlet for my writing would be enough, and for a time it was.  My Muse bailed on me, though, and lately I have lacked the will to scale Parnassus to find her.  See what I just wrote there?  I CAN do this, it's just grown so damned hard.  I could write, ad infinitum, about my ongoing love of video games, but I've gotten the sense no one wants to read that stuff here.  There are scores of dedicated gamer blogs, blessedly unencumbered by the author's gender identity hang-ups.  Ditto for any of the other things that have captured my fancy over the years.  There are other sources for that stuff.  Anything new to see here?  Probably not.

The end of this blog isn't set in stone or anything.  I just need to know if I still have an audience.  I'm likely to write a little something later this month, if for no other reason because Bioware are releasing a new downloadable content pack for Mass Effect 3, and I may feel compelled to say a little something about it.  If anyone actually is still reading me, please, please drop me a line.  I'd even accept a well-worded rant at this point.

I'm a Bad Girl

Two Spaces After a Period: Why You Should Never, Ever Do It
It's the way I was taught to type, oh so many years ago. Writing on a computer is typing, is it not? I was trained to end a sentence, after the punctuation mark, with two spaces. Apparently this is improper, and has been for some time. How does one miss out on a point of style like that?

Changing Tastes

This isn't really a movie blog, for all that I talk about them off and on. If nothing else, they give me inspiration when my well seems to run dry.

I own a lot of movies on DVD, and for a while I bought them almost compulsively, but I haven't watched a lot of them in a long time. I used to say I didn't have the time, but the truth is that lately I have trouble sitting in front of a screen unless whatever I'm doing/watching is interactive, like a video or computer game. The much-mentioned Mass Effect 2 consumed many such hours last year. I haven't been able to get online at home for the past five days, so I've been trying to fill my downtime with other activities. I read some, Matthew Chapman's Trials of the Monkey, and made myself sit down and watch two movies.

The first of these was Joe Carnahan's The A-Team. I know, I should have known better. I've ranted before about needing brain bleach to scrub the horror that is Smokin' Aces out of my head, but I have a soft spot in my memory for the original material.

The original A-Team hit television when I was ten, and for all my internal turmoil, on the outside, I was very much a boy of that era. I liked action figures, and still played war games in the yard with the neighborhood kids, and liked to see stuff blow up. The characters were veterans of Vietnam, a conflict which still has a large place in American mythology, and I looked up to anyone who had been "over there". I also liked Robin Hood, and the idea of these modern outlaws helping ordinary people in need was appealing.

The film is a sort-of reboot. The story has been brought forward so that the characters are vets of the current Iraq war. The movie opens with Liam Neeson as Hannibal assembling his "A-Team" as civilians (or at least de-mobbed troops), then catapults them into the war to kick off the story with the "crime they didn't commit". Bradley Cooper (Alias), Sharlto Copley (District 9) and Quinton "Rampage" Jackson (he's apparently an MMA fighter) round out the 'Team. Jessica Biel plays the leader of the DOD team chasing them, and doubles as Cooper's love interest. There isn't much story. Being a Carnahan film, there are lots of gun battles, and explosions, and some neat aerial action. Copley gives the standout performance as the crazy pilot, Murdock.

For all that, it was only okay. Is that damning with faint praise? Once upon a time I would have loved the movie, for all of the reasons enumerated above.

Yesterday I sat down and watched Whip It, with Ellen Page and Marcia Gay Harden. I loved it!

I wrote about the movie and posted the trailer back in 2009, before the movie was released. I've been interested in roller derby since it was resurrected a few years ago. It's one of those things I have to worship from afar, as they're never going to let a girl like me into something like that.

Ellen Page is Bliss Cavendar, a 17 year-old girl from sleepy little Bodeen, Texas. Her mom pushes her to enter beauty pageants, but she wants to get out and do her own thing. On a shopping excursion in Austin, she hears that the roller derby league are having try-outs. She lies about her age, and ends up finding her niche skating for the "Hurl Scouts". All of the skaters and teams have punny names: Eva Destruction, Smashley Simpson, etc. Bliss becomes "Babe Ruthless".

I laughed, a lot. I cried a little. All in all, I enjoyed everything about this movie. The acting is great from all the players. This was Drew Barrymore's directorial debut, and if she's this good starting out, I can't wait to see what she comes up with next.

I talked to my sister-in-law about this, because I couldn't figure why the two movies hit me the way they did. She says I'm becoming a girl. Small steps, right?

Another Blog

One of the bloggers I read intersperses her real-life blogs with entries concerning an ongoing campaign of her favorite video game, written as though she were the character she plays, visiting those places, interacting with those people, and sometimes killing them.

I used to fancy myself a fiction writer, but I stopped exercising that particular talent, and it withered on the vine. I started this blog and the others before it to brush up on my writing skills, to get back into the practice of word-slinging. Now I'm feeling the urge to try out something creative, but I'm taking baby steps by playing in somebody else's sandbox.

In a couple of days I'm going to kick off a new Mass Effect 2 campaign, and I'm going to start writing log entries as though I were that version of Commander Shepard. I'm also going to illustrate this thing, with a combination of promotional images authorized for such use by EA and Bioware and some screenshots I'll take from the game in-progress.

This is not without a certain amount of relative danger. The Mass Effect universe and everything in it are still very much the property of EA and Bioware. I don't think this vanity project of mine will do anyone any harm, but corporations can be a mite persnickety with regard to fair use of their intellectual property. They could slap me with a Cease and Desist order, and that would be the end of that. We'll just have to see.

I'm not ending this blog by any stretch of the imagination, but I hate to clutter this place up with wildly off-topic material. I don't want someone who's been away from here for a while to come back and read about my adventures in the Terminus Systems and come away thinking I'm spacier than ever.

I'll put up a link when this thing is ready to kick off. I'm still trying to find an appropriate blog title, using a phrase from the game. Oddly enough, a lot of them are already taken. That's what I get for jumping on the bandwagon seven months late.

A Postcard from the Wall

I haven't been posting a lot lately, and I apologize. The truth is there hasn't been a lot to write about. I'm stuck in another of my ruts. I go to work. I come home, where I sleep, eat, read, use the internet, and play the 360. There is some variety as to what order I do those things in, but it's the same shit day in and out, and it's wearing me down again. I've been back to work about a month, and that's great, but work is only one part of what it takes to make me whole, and a lot of the rest is missing.

It's strange. On the outside, I feel fine. In fact, I feel pretty good. A couple of days ago, I stepped onto a scale for the first time in a year or more, and discovered that I'm not nearly as heavy as I thought. I'm still a little large for my size, but I'm down fifteen pounds from the last time I weighed myself, and that's no mean feat, especially for one who likes to snack as I do.

Underneath the surface, though, I'm a mass of roiling despair. You know that Nietzsche quote about gazing into the abyss? I wish I could see that. At least I'd know something was looking back at me from the black. Some days I feel as though I could end it. I've always viewed suicide as the coward's way out, and I am not a coward, but there are days when it's a chore just to get out of bed. Sometimes I just can't see the point anymore. There's just no joy in my life right now.

It's not that there's no pleasure at all. On the contrary, I've found plenty of little things to carry me along. I've been building a Youtube playlist of the songs I've heard at work. Give it a listen, and maybe you'll get a sense of the sounds of my job.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=29B52928D441DE51

Six weeks or so ago, both of the outside cats here went into heat, and the kittens are now in the process of being farmed out. The family are keeping a couple, and one of the little critters has glommed onto me, so maybe Spot won't be an only child anymore.

I've been reading some good books lately. The latest is horror/thriller novel entitled Feed. You can read all about it here:

http://www.thefeedbook.com/

Imagine a time in which blogs take over the news from the traditional media outlets. I won't give away the plot or premise of the book, but the gist of it is that a major, civilization-ending catastrophe arises, and the traditional news sources drop the ball, leaving internet-based media to pick up the slack and keep people informed. After a time, blogs become the news medium of choice. I'd like to write something like that, but I'm having trouble keeping this up. That brings me to a logical conclusion.

I think I'm going to step back from this blog for a while. I'm not quitting. I just need to sort some things out. I called this my "Trans Blog", but lately it's become a clearing house for whatever is on my mind, and lately that's a whole lot of nothing. I'll come back when I have a better idea of what my place is here. It might be next week, or further out, but I will return.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

I love internet memes, to a point. This afternoon, a friend of mine posted the following on Facebook:



"India Foxtrot Yankee Oscar Uniform Charlie Alpha November Uniform November Delta Sierra Tango Alpha November Delta Tango Hotel India Sierra, Charlie Oscar Papa Yankee India Tango Alpha November Delta Papa Alpha Sierra Tango Echo India Tango Tango Oscar Yankee Oscar Uniform Romeo Lima India Victor Echo Juliet Oscar Uniform Romeo November Alpha Lima."

For those not fluent in NATO-standard alphabet code, it says

"If you can understand this, copy and paste it to your LiveJournal."

I had a LiveJournal once, and I still have an account (just so I can comment on other people's blogs), but I wasn't going to post all that (which I typed out by hand, just now), just for the sake of carrying on the internet's latest equivalent to a chain letter. But I decided to play along, so I posted a comment about not using LiveJournal anymore, and instead doing all my writing on Blogger. Which prompted a query regarding the link, only worded as

"Juliet Alpha Yankee Echo: Lima India November Kilo?"

Just out of curiosity, I did a Google search a few minutes (or is that Mikes?) ago for "India Foxtrot Yankee Oscar...", and it seems that this popped up on Twitter eleven days ago. I do not use Twitter. I will not use Twitter. I don't even read other people's Twitter feeds. I don't need to know about ANYTHING that badly. I don't think I've ever been that concerned with what John Scalzi calls "the blatherations of others". That might be a misquote (I think it refers to comments on his blog), but I feel it's appropriate. Now I'm sorry that I've perpetuated this thing.

The Power of Memory

This is one of those times when I don't have to worry about writing the same sorts of things as other bloggers, because we're all writing about the same things.

Thursday was Thankgiving Day. I won't waste any wordage here about the historical significance of the day, or the revisionism, or any of that dreck. Nor will I recount the contents of the feast (though it was fine), or reminisce of dinners past. No, I just want to say that I woke up this afternoon to the aromas of a traditional dinner, and for a moment, I was twenty, and ten, and five, and I took a deep breath, and all was right with the world.

Thinking of You

Yes, I'm thinking about you, and it's driving me crazy. So crazy, in fact, that I'm having trouble hammering this out. But I promised I'd write about it in the blog, and here it is.

I'm flattered by your attention, and flustered by it all at the same time. I've got friends, but no one I've met in a long time has been so fascinated with me. It's an ego booster, but it makes me insecure at the same time. I feel like everyone is looking at me, even if it's only one person. I'm accustomed to being something of a spectacle out in public, but it's different feeling that way behind closed doors, with the person who's looking at me 200 and some miles away.

There's more I want to say, but I can't articulate it right now, not with my mind in such disarray. There'll be more when I can compose myself better.

For the Record

I ended my unofficial contest last week. No one correctly guessed either of my movie quotes (thus showing my geekiness), but I decided to reward the people who did respond to the threads with the promised writing projects. As soon as they get them to me. Caroline, I'm going to give yours my all, but I need to do some research first.

No Takers?

Yesterday I posted a trivia question at the bottom of one of my posts. I offered a prize, then still to be determined, to the first person to correctly identify the source of the title of the post. It's from a movie quote, and I thought that there were enough movie geeks in my audience that someone would find it out.



Maybe I need to be more specific about the prize. Maybe no one's answered because no one wants the prize. You'd probably be a little more enthused if you knew what I was offering.



The winner gets to choose a topic for this blog. You answer my question, and I'll let you pick a topic. I haven't taken on a writing project from someone else since I left school, so this could be cool. I think I'll make this a running thing. If no one gets the original question, I'll post another later in the week, and we'll see what happens.

Not an Original Idea in My Head

I had a piece all laid out. A few years ago, while working the night shift, I started contemplating the weird relationship that seems to exist between pop music and the practice of stalking. I began to compile a list of songs, some overtly hostile, others more subtly sick. I found lots of fodder for my thinking. I was all set to post it yesterday, as the inaugural bit of my off-topic rants. I just wanted a reference for a song title I was going to mention. In the course of my search, I discovered a number of articles, already written on the subject. They cite all of the songs I listed, and a few more besides. "AAAAAUUUUUGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!" as Charlie Brown used to say.

As an adjunct to the stalking piece, I wrote a little bit about the music of Tori Amos. I love Tori Amos. What's not to love? She's a brilliant musician, maybe a little crazy, and a redhead to boot! She originally entered that line of thought because of a song that appears on her third album, Under the Pink. The song is entitled "The Waitress". I wanted to write a serio-comedy bit about playing her music, as a man. I thought it must be deliciously funny to be able to write and play some of the stuff she's written, being a woman. Can you imagine a man singing the following:

I want to kill this waitress
She's worked here a year, longer than I
If I did it fast, you know that's an act of kindness

But I believe in peace
I believe in peace, BITCH!...

See what I mean? A male player in a piano bar would be tossed out into the street, or worse.

Alas, I can't play a piano for anything, and the dream died.