anjylle

 Who, me?

Yeah, EVE Online FanFest 2012 is fast approaching. I've got my flights and hotel rooms lined up, but unlike the last two years, I get in for free; not only that, but I'll be getting paid for my time there. Helping to set up the day before, turning up to pub events in the company shirt, working the front desk, leading a pub crawl through Reykjavik, and -- oh yeah -- being in charge of a round-table discussion regarding women who play EVE, their experiences and how we can improve on them.

That last part is important. It's no secret EVE is a massive sausage-festival, and that approximately 4% (I'd suggest even fewer, considering what I've seen in my time as a GM) of the player-base is female in real life. I've been lucky in most of my ingame dealings, but there have been a few times where I've run up against rampant misogyny from players both twice my age and half my age which made me take a step back and say, "Hey. I don't have to put up with your shit," and leave a group.

I want to get dialogue going on this. I know there's no way to police it, but I want to at least raise awareness that this kind of crap is going on, and that women players aren't entirely defenseless.

Guys who show up will be invited to contribute, too. Their experiences with women playing EVE are just as important.

I'll need to find someone who can take notes. Or film this. Hmm....

 My cat is ill.

Not in the headcold/respiratory way she was when we got her from the Humane Society; in a way that requires a series of medication and the kitty equivalent of dialysis for at least the next two weeks.

I took her to the vet's for a full dental job and to remove a polyp -- like a mole grown out of control -- from her right ear. They have to anaesthetise animals for dental work, anyway, so I ticked the box requesting a full blood workup. She's only 5, but I didn't think we'd had one done before.

I got a call while I was at work, saying they'd found elevated liver enzymes in her blood test. Not good. That could mean anything from ingestion of something toxic (I don't THINK I've left anything lying around, but it's so hard to be sure) to bacteria from her teeth doing damage (her teeth were in horrible condition, they had to remove two)... to cancer. I really, really hope it's just bacterial damage from her teeth; THAT can be dealt with easily. They also found a second polyp further in her ear that they couldn't completely remove, and her ears are badly infected.

So I have to give her ear drops twice a day, amoxicillin to head off potential infection from having her teeth removed, and a massive tablet to help clear her liver up. The tablet is actually the easiest part, since I can stuff it in a pill-pocket treat and she seems to love those. The rest is a massive struggle, and I'm paying the vet's the do the liquid treatments three times next week because I know I won't be able to get a needle into her, much less make her hold still for it.

The next two weeks will be... "fun". And a bit expensive, but it's not like I'm spending the money on myself right now. Hopefully it'll do the trick and we won't need more extreme measures. I can tell she's feeling much better already, she's eating all her food again and constantly demanding snuggles :)

One of my friends runs an annual fiction contest for us Eve fanfic writers. It's not openly supported by the company, but they do pay attention. This year, the official magazine, E-ON, got involved, offering to print some of the winning stories. The number of submissions, of course, skyrocketed, and they extended the deadline by a week.

And I somehow still managed to land in one of the second-place brackets. With a silly little thing I wrote whilst sitting on a sofa in the FanFest venue in Reykjavik.

I already have a piece of fiction going into the latest E-ON -- my second published work, hurrah! -- so I'd be VERY surprised if this one makes it in. But it was a lot of fun to write.

Linked, if anyone wants a peek at it. I don't think you have to be an Eve player to understand it. Well, I hope that's the case.

Nervously eyeing up the weather right now. We're snowed-in -- it's not deep (yet) but the roads are quite slick and there've been a lot of spin-outs and accidents. We were going to be driving up into the Massachusetts hills to visit my dad's parents, but the route is kinda treacherous in heavy weather -- we've had one spin-out accident there in the past, and Mum's really not eager for a repeat performance. Nor, for that matter, am I, since one of the vehicles being risked would be mine.

Hopefully it'll be clear and good for travel by Thursday, since I'm scheduled to be on a flight to Reykjavik that evening. I'm not nervous at all about flying INTO Iceland. They know how to deal with winter weather there -- Keflavik has a heated runway, and the crew aren't averse to shovelling when necessary. It's getting out of the States, and back in a week later, that worry me.

Back.

Braindeaded (just a li'l).

I ended up in London for all of three days (and a bit) for an Eve meetup. Hideously geeky, yes, yes, shaddap, it was my alliance's 5-year anniversary. Five years is a bloody long time in Eve, where things can flip 180 in the space of a day.

The jet-lag may just kill me, but it was worth it. I had fun. Didn't take nearly as many pictures as I wanted, but I was having too much fun to want to step back and remove myself from the scene even for a little bit.

Shenanigans were had. We saw a film called Skyline for a laugh (don't bother doing to see this film. It was so bad, by 30 minutes in, we couldn't even eat our popcorn, like in that Eddie Izzard sketch).

Also, getting lost trying to get back to the hotel and spending an hour and a half slogging along the South (ish) Bank after midnight produced some interesting photos. At least I hope they're interesting; I've not had time to load them on the computer yet.

They ought to redesign airliner chairs so people can't drop them back so fast or so far. I mean, there's comfort, and then there's damaged laptops and unapologetic dickheads. And the stewardess decided she didn't like me for some reason and kept 'forgetting' to offer me drinks when they were running around with the trolleys.

I did TRY LotRO. For a bit. It plays like WoW, only with better story-telling, and I really wanted to see how it worked your story into that of the original novels.

Alas, first my OS was incompatible with the graphics drivers needed to run the game. And now that I have a fully upgraded PC, the game files are corrupted every time I download them. and installation fails.

Anybody else have this issue?

I just received an email from a BBC journalist. Back a month or so ago, they had an article about the US midterm elections and the Tea Party, and I submitted a short statement regarding my position on it.

Now I'm being asked for a short video for the BBC website stating how I would rate Obama's first two years and how I hope the midterms will go.

o_O wat? Seriously?

I have a dream.

No, I'm not stealing MLK Jr's thunder, unlike some self-serving, inconsiderate hypocrites recently. This is a different sort of dream.

I'm registered as an Independant voter. I have been for the last ten years, and I do not see this changing. This is because none of the American political parties -- and particularly neither of the top two, which are really the only two that have a say in ANYTHING -- represent MY values.

Hey! I'm not being represented by my own damn government! What gives, people?!

You know that Tea Party thing we have going over here? I have no time for their bigoted rubbish, it infuriates the piss out of me. But you know what I've come to realise?

They have a point.

Not in what they stand for; heaven help us, they're a cruel, cruel joke of the worst side of American culture. No, I mean they have a point in forming a movement.

Too bad that, rather than forging a new political party through it, they've entrenched themselves in the Republican party. If you thought the Republicans were as far-right as it was possible to get before, just watch what happens in the next 6 months.

I wish the more left-wing members of American society would get together and do something similar. Alas, as with all people who utilise the ability to think for oneself, most seem to feel no need to force their personal politics down others' throats. It's a double-edged sword: respecting one's own ability to think independently leads to a respect for others' ability to think independently as well... even if those people choose to squander that gift.


My dream is for an end to the American bi-partisan system.


What currently exists in the US political system is running in binary. One party says "YES!" and the other party, wishing to thoroughly discredit the other party, despite the consequences to the nation and its people, say, "NO!"

And nothing gets done, and things get worse.

This isn't politics. These people are not inspired by anything more than their bank balances. They DO NOT CARE about anything other than obtaining and keeping power and discrediting the competition through lies and deceit and mud-slinging, and if it drags the entire country back down into the Dark Ages? Hey, there were absolute rulers back then, a similar cultural setup is only to their benefit, right?

I remember a time when there were politicians who were actually worth supporting. They stuck to their guns and spoke their minds rather than repeating party lines with all the brainless skill of a trained parrot. You may not have agreed with all their policies, but you could trust them to do what they felt was right, and that made all the difference.

I wish the Tea Party people had pulled a split from the Republican party. It might have started the landslide necessary to forge the revamp of the American political system which is so badly needed right now. If all of a sudden, rather than one YES party and one NO party, there were half a dozen with differing levels of YES and NO, it could only be a good thing. There would be more compromise. More new ideas, rather than trying to fall back on the (Not-So-)Good-Old-Days. Less rose-tinted glasses and more looking at what needs to be bloody fixed.

And it might have galvanised the more openminded people to try their hand at making things happen, rather than sitting there shaking their heads and wishing there was something they could do. If I thought I could get support and backing for it, I'd try to help found a new political party.

But what does it take, when that same cohesive force doesn't exist?

I think it went really well. I'll hear back in a couple weeks if they want to move me to the next stage of the hiring process or not.

I think it was 2004 that I started my initial LiveJournal account. How time flies. There's nearly 2000 posts on there, now (!), and while I don't post nearly as much as I used to, I do still find myself in need of a clutter-free space to organise my thoughts.

We shall see how well DW suits my needs. I'll see if I can cross-post to LJ for the people who still use it.