Laughter Through Tears

Casil has immersed herself fully in a flawed understanding of disability that I tend to think of as the “character balance” fallacy. In a tabletop RPG, character types are generally written to be balanced, so that each player will have a fun and interesting experience. A swordfighter might be better at up-close combat but vulnerable to magical attacks, for example, while a mage might have the ability to shoot long-distance firebolts but be unable to wear much armor. Ideally, characters have equal advantages and disadvantages. Some games even have systems where you can “buy” advantages with disadvantages. Want more points to spend on more impressive spells? Find something that will make your character’s life more difficult, and maybe you can make that work.

Excerpted from Human flaws and disability: NOT the same thing by Tili Sokolov, because it struck me that it was an unusual but apropos perspective. I got there via Jim Hines' No, We’re Not All Disabled, a very even-toned takedown of the original blog post in question. Note that the original post, which Hines quotes extensively, is the kind of ablist bullshit that makes a weird vein pop in my forehead, so. Content note to those who don't need that toxicity in their lives on a Friday afternoon.

Now this just reminds me that I need to write more about "how (not to) write disability" and I've been putting it off.

Browsing free romance e-book summaries is endlessly more satisfying when Jailbreak the Matriarchy is installed.

Inspired by Book Depository's big sale on books that no one wants.

ETA: Case in point, some choice extracts:

"[W]illing to risk his life <...> even if it means giving himself over to a woman he's never met."

"Two sisters want to possess him."

"He’s a fiery-tempered fighter pilot..." (that's more than enough, really)

"A lifetime of sheltering makes him reckless."

I can write a lot of things into the seminar paper I'm (ostensibly) working on, but I don't think I can get away with making the argument that psychiatry speciously groups together homosexuality, male bisexuality, female gender dysphoria, and straight male crossdressing -- merely because all of these are equally threatening to the modern conception of heterosexual masculinity.

Snippet behind the cut.

( I have no idea what I'm doing, this is what flailing in the dark looks like. )

This week has been weird.

I just... don't know what I'm feeling anymore. Am I panicking? Am I anxious? Am I complacent? Am I having a breakdown? Am I physically ill? Have I got my shit together? Am I turning my life around? Am I giving up too easily? Am I clinging to something obsolete and worthless? Is my life moving forward, straying or stagnating?

I wish I could take a magical certainty pill. I guess that's the attraction of games. They give you limited options so you basically always know what you should be doing.

The guy I had to talk to today just couldn't figure out why I spent forty five minutes talking about classes and exams when he asked me about my life. He also couldn't seem to grasp why I was so concerned with my financial future. I guess he was expecting something along the lines of 'This is my plan for having a penis inside of me and later also babies' or something along those lines.

School. Work. Making something of my life. Achieving something tangible. Securing my future. These are not odd goals for a woman of almost twenty eight.

Should I allow myself to get subsumed in emotion today, and work on my class assignments tomorrow, or the other way around?

Yes, I am still wading in the miasma of uncontrollable erupting feelings that this spring has decided to land on me. No, I don't know how or why. Yes, I am trying to find a more long-term solution for the matter, but it is hard.

Last night I went out to a "lights show" with my brother, but it was sort of a disaster. I had a big panic attack.

I wish my grades more often reflected my level of interest in the material I learned. Sometimes they do, but not enough. Especially this semester, when I basically loved almost all my classes, but I feel like outside factors got in the way and I won't score very well. Sometimes I feel judged by vague external forces with no name. I guess that's an anxiety thing.

Earlier this week, my knee got fucked up right before pilates. The second half of the week I was kind of a mess and that makes buses and trains complicated because I have to sit diagonally. My knee won't go to ninety degrees when it's pretty badly off. This also triggers the "everyone is silently judging me" reaction.

Video games and comics have decided to be ass this week, and I can't really deal with it but I will feel cowardly if I ignore it. The Lara Croft things especially brings up a lot of crap that I seriously don't know how to process at this juncture. Ugh everyone please stop this forever, haven't we already been through this dance enough times?

So I hear some Hunger Games fans have gone all Blaise Zabini on the fandom's ass after watching the film.

How fucking depressing.

Anyway I totally want to watch the movie because it sounds fluffy and fun. I do have that damn neuro lab tomorrow, though, so I don't know if I'll have the energy to go out on Thursday night. Bluh. Tomorrow will be bad, I have ten straight hours of class with only one free period. Also I cooked food for the whole week but it's already almost run out, I have to do some cooking tonight or something. Which means I have to stop for groceries on the way back from the library.

And I will apparently need to buy the Cognitive Neuroscience book, because checking it out from the library every time I need it simply won't work.

Gloria Steinem on Chelsea Lately. Whoa.

I have Thoughts on Game of Thrones 1x1-2.

( Read more... )

Whoops I got paleontology on your epic fantasy.

I am tired of school and I have a headache, so let us have some awesome stuff.

For National Coming Out Day, FYLGBT had a post entitled Growing Up Gay in 666: Fred Phelps in Retrospect, which is fascinating and sort of terrifying, and well worth a read.

nextian made an awesome post called the female character Yenta meme where people recommend awesome stuff with awesome ladies to each other. Sharing the love is always cool, and it's interesting to see what people are into. I posted here even though I already have a reading list a mile long, because I am greedy.

As a sort of down payment, I'd like to throw out some names of stuff I like with awesome ladies in it, and say something about why they're awesome: ( Cut for list of epic rambling )

Hey, it turns out I have less stamina for this than I thought. Maybe I'll do more tomorrow, or on the weekend. On the upside? My headache is mostly gone.

To avoid thinking about my unruly joints and confronting my doctor with a List of Questions, have a little linkspam. These are some of the links I preemptively kept open yesterday afternoon, so that I would have something to amuse myself during a three hour lecture with no internet. All in all, there were about a dozen, and one of them was a bust because it was the summary of a review and not the review itself. :(

femslash10! I am considering signing up, but I don't know about the listed fandoms. I will scrutinize the comments and decide.

Kate Harding has Evo Psych and Icky Girls, a guest blogger's awesome takedown of one of those dubious, prejudiced and all-around embarrassing to science evolutionary psychology studies. The same dubious researcher is featured on Queerty, with a study about fag hags and self-esteem, which is frankly embarrassing in its quality.

A relationship chart of esteemed personages from IO9, which includes Queen Victoria, Mary Shelley, Mark Twain, Pablo Picasso, Leon Trotsky and, of course, Kevin Bacon.

Fuck, yeah, tattoos and biology.