Ego! Ego! Ego!

Google Plus… and minus

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Ealasaid

So, I’m on Google+ now.

But I read this post (NSFW ads) and this one, which point out that the Google+ TOS is pretty draconian about nudity/NSFWitude, and that a violation of that TOS can result in your entire Google account getting nuked from orbit.

For example, say you post a link to a NSFW site. Someone flags your post, and you get slammed for violating the TOS (which forbids linking to porn but doesn’t seem to define porn clearly). All at once, you lose: your Gmail archives and contacts list, all your Google Docs files, and potentially access to sites where you use your Google login, like Blogger, Picasa, and YouTube.

While I can see why Google has the TOS they do (they’re mostly trying to cover their own ass), it has potentially far-reaching consequences. Hopefully that will change before Google+ goes public. I guess we’ll see. In the meantime, I won’t be using Google+ a whole lot, just to be safe.

Posted in Geekery | Tagged google | Comments Off

MOAR BOOKS

Posted on May 14, 2011 by Ealasaid

Went back to Powell’s today. No surprise there. Before bragging about the books I bagged, I would like to share this quote on the subject of bookbuying:

OK, onward! Here’s what I got today:

The Teahouse of the August Moon by Vern Sneider (an old paperback that was on sale and looked charming)
My Big Fat Supernatural Honeymoon edited by P.N. Elrod
Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi
The Recently Deflowered Girl: The Right Thing to Say On Every Dubious Occasion by Edward Gorey
The Fear Book: Facing Fear Once and For All by Cheri Huber
The Gothic Horror and Other Weird Tales by George T. Wetzel, art by Tim Kirk (had to get this, as Mom knows Tim Kirk)
Living Aikido by Bruce Klickstein under the Supervision of Morihiro Saito (this out of print book on Aikido has been taunting me the last few times I’ve been to Powell’s — I know it was there last year, and I believe it was there the previous time I was there, too. So, I finally gave in and bought it.)
I also bought Gloom: The Game of Inauspicious Incidents & Grave Consequences by Keith Baker, a card game that looks really intriguing. Like, if Edward Gorey had done a card game, it would be this one.

But the prizes of this trip are two Arkham House first editions: Dagon and In the Mountains of Madness, both by H.P. Lovecraft. They’re in surprisingly good shape, just some damage to their dust jackets. I found them in the Rare Book Room and they were *gasp* actually affordable! After a little halfhearted dithering, my bibliomania got the better of me, and I bought them.

Posted in Books | Tagged Portland, squee | 2 Comments

Vacation

Posted on May 11, 2011 by Ealasaid

Until fairly recently, I didn’t used to really know how to take vacations.

I’d go on trips where I wanted to pack so much into each day, each hour, that I was exhausted when I got home. I’d need a vacation just to recover from my vacation!

Really, what I was doing was traveling, visiting — not vacating.

Now I know better. Now, vacation is a stretch of time (at least a week) spent somewhere other than home, where I banish my alarm, banish scheduling, and just let myself be.

If I wake up and feel like going back to sleep, that’s what I do.

If I wake up and feel like getting up and going off to do something, that’s what I do.

If what I feel like doing is wandering around a garden, awesome. Or sitting in a cafe sipping decadent drinking chocolate, or wandering a bookstore searching for out of print books for my collection, or any of a host of things.

Sure, I look into my options in the city where I’m vacating, but that’s more so I know what my options are than out of an attempt to make a plan.

You’ll note I’m using “vacate” instead of “vacation” as the verb here, and that’s on purpose. To vacate is to leave, to give up, to make empty, and that’s what I’m doing here – leaving my routine, giving up my desire to have everything planned out, making my schedule empty so I can just be.

Everything slows down. Days seem a lot longer than they do at home. It’s wonderful.

My current vacating city of choice is Portland, OR. It’s full of all sorts of interesting things to do and see, but it’s also a surprisingly quiet, green, slow place. There are awesome brewpubs, gorgeous parks, unusual shops, you name it.

Plus, of course, there’s Powell’s.

I’m in Portland now, vacating with my sweetie, and it’s glorious as ever. I’ve already been to Powell’s once, but will likely find myself there again. My haul today:

Ultimate Aikido, Secrets of Self-Defense and Inner Power by Yoshimitsu Yamada
Training with the Master: Lessons with Morihei Ueshiba, Founder of Aikido by JOhn Stevens and Walther v. Krenner
Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere, by A. Westbrook and O. Ratti
A Life in Aikido: The Biography of Founder Morihei Ueshiba by Kisshomaru Ueshiba
Aikido Self-Defense: Holds and Locks for Modern Use by Bruce Tegner (this book is part of why I love Powell’s. It’s a small-press publication from 1961 and looks from the pictures like it bears little resemblance to the Aikido I study. A great addition to my collection!)
Daily Life of the Egyptian Gods by Dimitri Meeks and Christine Favard-Meeks
State of the Art by Pauline Kael
Art and Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking by David Bayles and Ted Orland
The War of Art: Break through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles by Steven Pressfield
My Stroke of Insight: A Brain Scientist’s Personal Journey by Jill Bolte Taylor, PhD
The Depression Book: Depression as an Opportunity for Spiritual Practice by Cheri Huber
Hogarth Essays, Second Series: Rochester: A Conversation Between Sir George Etherege and Mr. Fitzjames by Bonamy Dobree (Another delightful oddity I never would’ve found anywhere else, this book was published in 1926, and appears to be a fictionalized conversation between two of Rochester‘s contemporaries. Its binding is in terrible condition but the pages are in excellent shape.)
And, my prize from this run: A first edition of Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. I’ve given in and am collecting the hardcover first editions of the British printings of the Discworld books. This one is in great shape, with a well-preserved dust jacket. So pleased!

Time now to put my feet up and relax for a while before we walk over to dinner (we’re staying at the Mark Spencer, which is in downtown, only a couple blocks from the main Powell’s store!) at some local pub or other.

Ahhhhhhhhhhhh. Vacating.

Posted in Process | Tagged Portland, vacating | Comments Off

International Pagan Coming Out Day

Posted on May 2, 2011 by Ealasaid

Today is International Pagan Coming Out Day.

I was thinking about writing something really thoughtful for it — after all, while I’m mostly out in my day-to-day, offline life, I haven’t posted anything in particular about my paganism on this blog — but failed to make time, and now the day is here. Rather than abandon it, here is a somewhat unpolished, bare bones version of the post I was thinking I would write.

What is a Pagan?

There’s a joke in the Pagan community that if you get five Pagans in a room and ask them this question, you’ll get at least six answers. Some folks will say Druids are Pagans, but Heathens aren’t. Some folks consider anybody who isn’t a member of the big three Abrahamic religions to be Pagan, but it seems weird to me to classify Buddhists as Pagan.

A couple weeks ago, I suggested on Thorn Coyle’s blog that a “Pagan” could be defined as someone who fits a plurality of the following:

believes in immanent divinity
practices magic (ceremonial or otherwise)
is a polytheist of some stripe
doesn’t subscribe to salvation theology
is engaged in some sort of self-development (Knowledge and Conversation, self-possession, etc)
studies some sort of occult system (e.g. Qabalah).

I’d like to add “spiritual” before “self-development” in the next to last point, but otherwise I think it works okay as a start. I imagine there are plenty more things that could be added to the list!

Yes, I’m Pagan

For the curious, all but the last one of the list above apply to me. I believe in immanent divinity, practice magic, work with and honor several gods, and am working on self-possession, studying with Thorn Coyle. I also don’t subscribe to salvation theology — I have never really believed that humans need saving, even when I was a dedicated member of a United Methodist congregation.

Why Come Out?

Consistency, for one. I’m out most places (including at work), why not here?

Plus, I loved this post of Kyeli’s over at the Connection Revolution.

But mostly because if even one reader of my blog who didn’t know my religion but likes my writing pauses and reconsiders a negative reaction they might normally have toward Pagans, it’s more than worth my time.

In Closing

I’m not going to turn Ego! Ego! Ego! into a religion blog or anything. For one thing, this blog’s entire purpose is to be an outlet for my random-ass musings on whatever the hell I feel like writing about, and my interests are way too wide-ranging for it to turn into a one-subject thing for long.

Anyway. I’m happy to answer questions if anybody has ’em.

Posted in Srs Bznss | Tagged religion | 2 Comments

A few thoughts on pain

Posted on April 3, 2011 by Ealasaid

Thanks to my fibromyalgia, I’m in pain pretty much all the time. As a result, I spend a lot of time thinking about pain — mostly in the “dammit, I wish my hands didn’t hurt so much” sense, but sometimes I get philosophical.

I’ve been getting really philosophical since a conversation from my occasional personal trainer at the local 24 Hour Fitness. The exchange went roughly like this:

Him: How’s the weight? Too much? Just right?

Me: (between grunts) Just right. It hurts, but it’s the cold kind of pain, you know? The kind that doesn’t mean damage, just effort.

Him: What do you mean?

Me: You know, there are different kinds of pain, they mean different things.

Him: There are?

Now, before we get on his case too much, my occasional trainer is young and has never seriously injured himself. He hasn’t been in a lot of pain.

Me, I’ve injured myself a hell of a lot in my 33 years. As a kid, I had ridiculous growing pains. I won the barn’s frequent flier award because I fell off my pony so much (I was doing competitive jumping, and my pony wasn’t terribly interested in going over the higher jumps unless I set her up just right). I’ve strained and sprained my wrists and ankles more times than you can shake a stick at. I have been doing a martial art that involves flipping yourself through the air since I was a teenager (though I don’t do those falls anymore, I used to, and if you do them wrong, they hurt). I had my wisdom teeth out while in college, used to get migraines so bad they made me throw up, and have had major abdominal surgery, plus my knee surgery, plus the laparoscopic abdominal surgery a couple months ago.

And, of course, there are the regular aches and pains you get from being sick or falling or burning yourself or whatever. I’ve always been pretty rough and tumble, so I got bruised a LOT as a kid (and fairly often even now). It’s a minor miracle I haven’t broken any bones. *knock wood*

Now that I have fibro, I can’t always trust my body’s pain signals. Things that aren’t doing any real damage are sometimes excruciating — I’m having to learn to endure the pain I get from lactic acid buildup as I get back to riding a bike, for example. As anybody who’s heard about what happens to folks who can’t feel pain knows, this is a problem. Pain is a vital signal the body uses to warn against serious damage. I’ve had to learn to distinguish between false alarms and the real deal.

It’s kind of like that story about the boy who cried wolf — he raised the alarm when there was no wolf enough times that when there was one, nobody believed him. So, I’ve taught myself (mostly) how to tell when the little punk is lying and when there really is a problem.

That doesn’t mean that the pain doesn’t affect me — I have a VERY high pain tolerance now, but the body’s limbic system responds automatically to pain even if my conscious self knows it’s not a problem. Being in pain makes my adreniline glands go, sets off the endorphin reaction that causes runner’s high, and all that stuff. It’s tiring and makes me edgy, cranky, and tired. It’s sort of like if the head of the village knows the boy is lying about the wolf but the villagers get restless because they aren’t sure.

Not to mention, some kinds of pain are a lot easier to endure than others. Pain that I have some sort of control over is pretty easy, even when it’s really bad — the pain of getting waxed, or tattooed, or cutting a splinter out of my hand. Pain I can’t do anything about isn’t too bad if it’s a familiar pain — the way my knees used to ache when I climbed stairs or the pain of a sprained wrist. What’s really difficult is pain I can’t do anything about and am not familiar with. My normal day-to-day fibro pain is pain I’m used to, but when I have a flareup, it’s a lot harder. The pain after my knee surgery was totally unfamiliar, and extremely difficult to deal with because it was so unpredictable and different from what I was used to feeling in those joints. I’m starting to get used to the lingering pain as my tendons and ligaments finish adjusting to the changes the surgery wrought, but it’s taking a while.

A side effect of all of this is that I recognize different types of pain, the same way that some cultures have lots of words for things other cultures don’t (Hawaiian words for lava, for example). And that’s why my trainer had no idea what I was talking about.

I’m not sure what my point is with this rambling, but I’ve been thinking about this stuff a lot lately and wanted to get it down in writing.

Posted in Health | Tagged pain, rambling | 6 Comments

Loving my Body

Posted on April 1, 2011 by Ealasaid

As a female-bodied American, I struggle a lot with body image.

I do, however, have a surprisingly decent opinion of my body, all things considered. My therapist has complimented me on it, even.

Want to know my secret? Actually, if you’ve spent more than ten minutes with me, you probably already do, but here it is:

I don’t know how much I weigh.

Pretty simple, right? I never weigh myself — don’t even own a scale. I don’t let my doctor weigh me (that’s easier than you think. When the nurse tells you to step on the scale, smile and say cheerfully, “oh, I don’t get weighed,” and then look at the exam rooms til the nurse says which one to go into). When I work with a physical trainer, they don’t get to weigh me either. When I had surgery a few months ago I let them weigh me so the anesthesiologist could do his job, but I faced away from the display and made the nurse write it down without telling me.

For such a simple little thing, it has made a huge difference. I think it’s because I associate weighing myself with dieting, and I associate dieting with hating my body — and by extension, hating myself.

When I was dieting (first went to Weight Watchers in middle school, and was in and out until I went to college), weighing myself was how I determined my self-worth. Weight down? Go me! I’m a good, strong, disciplined person! Weight up? Wow, I suck and am a lazy-ass failure. That continued after grad school when I started weighing myself every day and keeping a spreadsheet to track a seven-day rolling average of my weight.

Our society has a disordered relationship with weight. We act like the number of pounds on the scale gives us an objective measure of health, but it doesn’t. It just tells us how much we weigh, and that’s such an irrelevant piece of information compared to the other objective numbers we could be using that it’s not even funny. It’s just sad.

I’m way more interested in how much I can lift, how far I can walk or bike, how low my blood pressure is, than how much I weigh. When I was a sophomore in high school, I was on the swim team for a second year and was incredibly fit. I swam eight times a week, and rode horses and did Aikido as well. At the start-of-season physical, my blood pressure and resting heart rate were so low the nurse practitioner got a different set of equipment because she thought the numbers were wrong.

And yet, I was pudgy. By most people’s standards, I should have been trying to lose weight. Never mind that I was a serious athlete (I even went to the county finals for the 50m Breaststroke!).

People like Ragen Chastain and my sophomore-self prove that you can be fat and healthy.

But we still care more about what we weigh than about whether we can bench our body weight or do pull-ups. It’s stupid.

And it’s dangerous.

This irrational obsession with weight leads people to disordered eating, to self-harm, to the misery of hating themselves. I’m done with it.

I try to eat well (always a challenge). I exercise. I’m cautiously bringing myself back to a full load of Aikido and working out after a long-ass recovery from my knee surgery a year-and-change ago and my abdominal surgery in January.

Sure, I have moments where I look at my body in the mirror and wish it looked different. I have moments where I see a scale at someone’s home and think, “oh, it’ll just take a sec and it’ll be funny to see what the BMI thinks I am, it’s so stupid!” (when I know all I’ll do is look at the chart and feel like a failure because of what it says). I resist the temptation.

When I see myself in the mirror at the gym or while working out at home, I like what I see. When I’m on the mat at the dojo, I don’t really notice the mirrors because I’m focused on training, but when I catch glimpses, I see my posture and the way I move and I’m pleased.

I can do deadlifts now, thanks to my knee surgery, and that is way more important to me than the occasional roll of fat or what the scale says. The numbers I care about are the ones that actually matter — the ones on my blood pressure reading, the ones on my bloodwork, the ones on the dumbbells I am lifting.

The numbers on the scale are the entry to a rabbithole I am tired of going down. The only thing at its end is a dark cave with a funhouse mirror and a voice that says not thin enough, and I care about my body and my self, so I am staying the hell away.

Posted in Srs Bznss | Tagged diet, fat, self-love | 2 Comments

Red Dead Redemption

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Ealasaid

If I’ve talked to you in the last couple weeks, I’ve probably mentioned the game Red Dead Redemption, probably with the words “awesome!” and “so fun!” involved. I realized I haven’t blogged about it, so here we go!

RDD is from the folks who brought the world Grand Theft Auto, and is basically the same game, just set in the old West. I bought it for that piece I wrote for Filament magazine a few months back, and really liked it, but sort of got distracted and stopped playing. I’m back at it now, though, and OMG IT IS SO FUN. For one thing, there’s now an expansion that lets you play a version where your character is battling a zombie plague.

You heard me right. Zombies. In the old West. And yes, Marston’s on a zombie horse. The plague affects animals, too (you haven’t lived til you’ve been attacked by zombie coyotes).

Anyway: you can do pretty much whatever you want in the game, outlaw stuff or law-abiding stuff, and it affects the behavior of others around you. For example, doing good guy stuff (like rescuing people or bringing in wanted criminals) will make folks give you discounts and be more likely to ignore it if you do commit a crime around them. If you do outlaw stuff (like stealing or killing people) the law will come after you, and if you do enough, bounty hunters will show up and try to take you down every so often. You can bribe witnesses to your crimes as well as the lawmen who come after you.

The main plot, which is seriously maybe 25% of the gameplay if you’re like me, concerns your character, John Marston, having to hunt down a guy he used to be in a gang with. The feds are blackmailing Marston into doing the job since they can’t manage to do that. Marston isn’t happy about it — he’s trying to go straight — but the feds are threatening his family, so he does it.

There are some annoyances to the game, of course, but mostly it’s surprisingly awesome. When you’re on horseback, the interactions with the horse are very similar to riding in real life (like, your horse won’t run off a cliff, and if you keep kicking it all the time to go faster, it will buck you off). You can shoot wild animals (and sometimes have to — if you follow me on Twitter you know about the cougars that will try to kill you if they find you) and then skin them and sell off their parts to make money. There are minigames like poker, liar’s dice, and horseshoes, and so on. There are duels and stuff, too.

My favorite thing about the game, though, is probably the art and music. Just riding around in the game is really beautiful. The art is gorgeous, and you can hear birds and various wildlife around you, and the music manages to be enjoyable and reminiscent of all the movies and tv shows set in the West without being annoying.

Nate and I have just recently started playing together online — you can be one of a host of characters (not Marston) and do things like roust gangs out of their hideouts. It’s the only way to do multiplayer, which is annoying, but it’s really fun, and if you both wear XBox Live headsets, it’s almost like playing in the same room. Since I have the zombie pack, I can play as a zombie, so I have been. It’s kind of hilarious to see townsfolk talking politely to a bloody lady zombie as if she were just another person passing through.

It’s reached the point where if I’m not at work or Aikido or working on a book, I’m almost certainly playing RDR. This game rocks.

Posted in Geekery | Tagged gaming, red dead redemption | Comments Off

Minimalism

Posted on March 22, 2011 by Ealasaid

I’m sure it will come as no surprise to anyone that I’m not a minimalist. All it takes is one look at the enormous number of books and DVDs (and knick-knacks and whatnot) I own. You don’t even have to walk more than three feet into my tiny, stuffed-full apartment to see it.

So, I was intrigued when I saw the title of this Lifehacker post from 2010: A Minimalist Lifestyle Does not Make You A Better Person. I’m a fan of critical looks at minimalism and decluttering, largely because I feel kind of defensive about how much stuff I have. Sure, I’m working on decluttering, but I know in my heart I will only take it so far.

I realized a big part of why the minimalist lifestyle isn’t for me is my inherent distrust of electronic copies of things. This paragraph, near the end of the piece, is what did it:

In fact a physical object, to me, is a liability. Something physical can be broken or lost or burned down. Something electronic can be duplicated and backed up on multiple continents.

Now, I’m painfully aware of the risks to physical objects (a house fire is one of my great dreads), but electronic copies always strike me as far less safe than physical ones. I’ve lost plenty of stuff to crashes, partition overwrites, and server meltdowns (I left my first webhost over the latter). Sure, you can back things up, but I always worry about the security of such backups (anything electronic isn’t really secure if it’s on a piece of hardware connected to the internet, after all). All it takes is one employee fuckup and my offsite backup could be toast, or spread far and wide.

Electronic copies are so fragile. They can disappear in an instant, with one or two keystrokes. A magnet or a sudden slam can destroy the hardware they’re held on. A physical print is a lot more resilient than an image file.

This is probably a sign that I’m in that sliver of the genX/genY crossover who didn’t quite grow up with the internet, and this is the equivalent of waving my cane while yelling about how I don’t trust this newfangled technology. But that’s okay. When the nuclear apocalypse comes and the EMP destroys all your cloud backup servers, if you ask nice I might loan you one of my books.

Posted in Geekery | 1 Comment

Blog Flogging

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Ealasaid

In response to Junglemonkey‘s generous invitation to allow people to plug their blogs on her own, I’m doing the same – giving anyone who comments here the chance to sell their blog to the handful of bibliophiles (and Ealasaid-ophiles) who read this blog!

So, make a comment! Leave your name and let me know what kind of stuff you write. Do you portion out slices of life? Practice amateur comedy? Dissect current events? When you comment, there are a couple of rules:

1. You must be following this blog to make a comment.
2. You must do this on your blog too in order to give your followers a chance to gain new folks.

Come on – you have nothing to lose and perhaps a few friends to gain!

Posted in Silliness | Comments Off