Monthly Archives: July 2015

Still swamped and sick

I’ve been dragging myself out of bed to work on commission art (11… or was it twelve?  Sexy Desktop ladies, a book cover and some other stuff.) Sold a computer that was sitting idle to someone who needed it in an instalment plan; and I’m hoping to get a battery for my little netbook soon. I wish I could afford to buy a portable Cintiq and a new computer for the bedroom so that while I’m too sick to sit up I can draw in bed and keep working. At least with the netbook I can write while in bed and it’s not bulky. (Ok, theoretically I could write with Ayumi the super tiny netbook but I need new glasses first.) However, writing with an objective as opposed to rambling requires the ability to concentrate and focus, so alas, no essay or story writing for me. I REALLY NEED TO GET NOT SICK. The only reason that I can still draw is because I don’t need to be coherent or make sense when drawing. I can draw without worrying about whether or not my grammar is being infected by German or French or did I just insert the Japanese borrowed term for something I just wrote…

We’ve been flat out this last few weeks. I’ve got commissions from people who want Sexy Desktop Lady backgrounds (and I’ve been told for most of them “whatever you wanna draw is fine! – as long as it’s a pretty girl) – most of them from people who are also asking Aff to do system builds for them.

One of the customers brings us Maccas whenever he drops by, enough that Aff says that he’s waiving the standard fee but the customer says it’s so he doesn’t feel bad that he’s eating all by himself.

On a happy note, I’ve a nice pile of manga, and artbooks and books that arrived today. I had a nice stack of Skip Beat omnibus volumes arrive the other day but I forgot to take a photo.

If this sight makes you itch for some new reads, I found out via some helpful Twitterfolk that the November 2015 Baen Book Bundle can be ordered. Larry Correia’s Son of the Black Sword is there, as well as Mike Kupari’s new book, and a bunch of what look like really good reads. I’m going to wait because I kinda smashed my book budget already so it’ll be sit and wait again.

Leaping off that tangent into another, ff you read science fiction and fantasy, you’ll need to read about one of the biggest scandals in the genre, which is “Breendoggle”, the thing that the anti-Sad Puppy people seem find LESS objectionable than Sad Puppies, simply by the dint of the NOISE that is made about Sad Puppies versus Breendoggle. The Story of Moira Greyland is heartbreaking to read, and she talks about how she was repeatedly raped and molested from the age of five by both her mother and father, both of whom are big names in science fiction and fantasy. One of the things I’m sure that lots of people will find objectionable despite what happened to Moira is the fact that Moira wonders if the lifestyle or the sexual identity of homosexuality has something to do with what happened to her, as she describes by her account that she was constantly being told that she was supposed to be a lesbian and pressured to be one, and that her parents were upset that she was born a girl. The comments only serve to prove this disappointing line of thought true.

In the vein, however, of that blog, she raises a point that shouldn’t be ignored, even if you support gay marriage in any way at all (like I support the concept, but not how it’s being executed or pushed for.) This is part of the whole ‘flip-side’ thinking that a lot of people don’t try to engage in any more – which is, contemplate the other side of a situation.

In this case, if the ideal situation of a child who identifies as gay is born to heterosexual parents, the parents accept their child’s homosexuality, then ideally the reverse is also true: that gay parents would accept their child’s (adopted, or partly biological/surrogate-born) heterosexuality. However, the question that is raised by what happened to Moira (aside from the rape) is whether or not this is happening, if heterosexual children are given the support they need, and whether any children at risk are actually given the protections they need (from both the ‘sides’ of homosexual and heterosexual parents). There are stories out there that give rise to doubt that equal treatment is given in this case; and it is clear that abuse happens to some children regardless of the orientation of the parents. However, my point is, is the discussion happening, and if it does, are those discussions being policed on whether they’d be perceived as ‘bigoted’ or ‘anti-gay’ or similar threats and fears?

For me, the core thing of being a parent is the ability to prioritize the child’s needs, safety, and future over the parent’s wants. This is true regardless of whether or not the parents in question are heterosexual or homosexual, or married or not. Parents need to ask themselves if their identity -whatever that may be- is more important than ‘parent.’ It tells the person what is their greatest priority – themselves, or their child? After all, having a child means you’re setting aside a massive chunk of one’s own time, needs and interests aside for the sake of the child. Simply put, if a person pondering parenthood puts being ‘gay’ or ‘heterosexual’ or anything else over ‘parent’, then perhaps they should rethink becoming parents. I do not think there should be a qualifier before the ‘parent’ part. It does not matter to me if the parents are gay or not; what is most important is whether the parents consider their children the most important thing to them.

The response on the Moira Grayland story makes me wonder indeed, if the honest and necessary discussions occur, as opposed to devolving to mere accusations of being hateful.

Can such discussions occur? I’d like to believe that they are, because I don’t know if they are.

Apologies for the delays in writing

The last few weeks have been quite horrible for me healthwise so far this month. I’ve had maybe 4 days of NOT being sick since the start of July. Gah. And I’ve been sick since before end of June.

First I had the monster flu that knocked me right off my feet for a week and a half, then I had the weird episode of feeling like I was burning up, but my temperature read thus:

We’ve got an Antarctic Vortex of cold blowing up from, well, the south. It’s so cold for us up in North Queensland that we’ve been getting temperatures like this:

My eldest son, Vincent, apparently has had a growth spurt, because the trousers we got him just a few months ago no longer fit. All of them. Except one pair. Vincent has that weird combo of sizes where he’s too thin for one size, and too short for another. He’s a skinny kid. So as much as possible I try to buy his clothes cheap; because he’ll suddenly outgrow clothes. So he caught a cold, and everyone has “noses that run like Kenyan Olympians going for the gold medal,” as per Aff’s oh so memorable description. (Sneezing and laughing at the same time hurts, I found that out the hard way.)

I don’t have this problem with my daughter. She has an immune system that gives sicknesses that takes out the rest of the household the bird and cruises along as normal. It’s still so cold though that I have the two children sleeping in Vincent’s room, to generate enough warmth to keep them warm. They’re bundled up in flannel PJs, and layers of blankets and two quilts. Me, because by myself I don’t really generate a lot of heat, am buried under a quilt, two fluffy thick throw blankets, and a cotton sheet. And am wearing layers of clothes.

Then a few nights ago I had a high stress event happen to me, resulting in this:

This was my BP an hour later.

Since it was coming down, albeit slowly, I decided not to call the ambulance and do what they would have done anyway: given me meds, told me to rest, and monitored my BP. I’m still recovering, but my BP is somewhat lower now, still a bit high for me though. (My normal is around 90/70.) I’m still having headaches though, and have been having problems keeping a train of thought steady. I’m familiar with this from when I was pregnant with Brandon though, so I just gotta bring my blood pressure down. I feel like I just went ten rounds as the practice throw dummy for a judoka, so I’ve been asleep a lot again.

Sincere apologies for the lack of follow-up essay. Hopefully I’ll feel less kicked-in the head soon.

Well that was scary

My blood pressure had climbed to 175/115 earlier this evening so if it hadn’t gone down in an hour, we were going to see if I should go to the hospital. So I lay down and tried to ignore the pain in my head and joints from the high blood pressure.

Aff had checked my blood pressure to see it had gone down to 154/94 (still bad, but at least it was going down) and was putting away the electronic bp thing when he suddenly bolted out the door of my room, and out the front door of the house, yelling “OI!!!!”

I jumped out of bed and grabbed kitchen knives, in case there was someone else, and waited til Aff came back. He said he saw someone peeking in through my window, a young teenaged boy maybe 13 years old. Aff said he chased the boy down the road and lost the kid when the boy bolted around the corner.

What the hell was a boy doing out at 3 am, in 15 degree C or less weather? O_o

Now I’m REALLY hurting, and my dystolic bp has climbed up to 110 again.

Cold weather blues

Sorry, I know I was supposed to be doing more essay stuff, but this cold snap wrecked me again and I’ve been sick, and trying to cough out a lung, or both of ’em.

But to show I’ve not been utterly slack, there’s a second FML strip up on Affsdiary, and there’s a couple of newish art on my deviantart, and there’s this entertaining video of some very good magicians on Youtube. Enjoy!

Brain-twitch Inducing Stupid

So the other night, we had a run in with a social justice bully / overly sensitive fainting couch CHORF in one of the MMOs Aff / David and I play, Lineage II. There’s a level 99 quest that requires you to use global shout a certain number of times, and you only get 3 a day. So David, on his character Seda the elven healer, cracks jokes in the form of very obviously bad advice: “Constipated? Drink Draino! It’ll clear you right up!”

Someone replies to him in area shout, “That’s terrible advice and illegal to say!”

David, in the same spirit of cracking wise, goes “I’m Australian thus not subject to US laws, and cracking jokes is part of our culture, and if you’re offended by that, you’re a bigot.”

The stupid bint goes “That’s still horrible to say! Don’t you know that if you say things enough times, the person listening will come to believe it and actually do it?”

Aff blinks and goes “Hang on, so you mean if I say to you enough times that you’re supposed to drink draino, you’ll do it?”

Idiot: Yes, that’s called peer pressure.

Aff: If you listen to some random person give out bad advice as a joke in a game I think you have far more serious issues than listening to jokes in a game.

Idiot: You’re a healer! Healers are in a position of trust! People are going to listen to you! You’re the number one cause of suicide in the US!

Aff: I am? Really? …SWEET!!! (In party) Holy crap wtf is wrong with this bitch?

Seth & Me: … speechless at ‘position of trust

Gothpixie, who’s in our party, says in party chat: I guess that Lineage II is more popular than I thought.

Seth: Why do you say that?

Gothpixie: Because it means that lots of people play L2 for Aff to be the leading cause of suicide in the US.

we crack up

Idiot in area shout: OMG You’re a terrible person I’m going to report you I’m so traumatized by what you said you’re so going to be banned so that people will be safer from you!

THEN a game master suddenly pipes up in area shout and says “Actually no, because he’s not breaking any rules.”


…Seriously I get so much material for my comic, FML, I barely need to edit the dialogue.

Homemade Wontons


As part of their holiday ‘fun thing’ I taught my eldest how to make chicken wonton filling / chicken meatballs. Eldest boy helped wrap up a few, but I had to take over or else we wouldn’t have dinner on time! Happily my little budding hearth witch mastered the wrapping of wontons quickly. We still have meat so we’ll make a packet of wontons to freeze, and make meatballs out of the rest.

Continue reading

Between This Essay and The Next

A few days ago, I retweeted something I saw on The Ralph Retort‘s feed and briefly wrote about how I stopped being a feminist in reply to that retweet. A brief discussion followed and I decided it would be best to expand on it. I guess it’s one of those ‘triggering’ things for me because whenever I flash back to that time, it always results in the same towering fury I remember having that pushed me to my feet and had me start shouting back. After all, all the hate they were spewing went against everything we ourselves had been taught about being good strong Catholic women. I decided to break it up into two parts because 1) I had to stop being angry because it really wasn’t doing good things to my heart rate and 2) I had to do stuff away from computer, namely lunch for the family. As it was I had to ask my daughter to handle the rest (just make sure it didn’t burn) because I needed to fall over into bed: I was burning up with flu and everything hurt. I’ve been bedridden since.

Ralph asked if he could feature it and I said yes.

While I was asleep it went up on his site.

I woke up today, fever broken, and went to check on the kids. My eldest boy, Vincent, was up already but Big Sis wasn’t so I sicced him onto her to wake her with cuddles, yelling “INVASION OF THE LITTLE BROTHER” at the top of my voice. Cue “KYAAAAA!!! What are you doing?! Oh, hugs.” The ruckus had Aff come out of his room where he was playing L2. I made coffee and sat down to look at stuff online. That’s when I saw that my account had gone up on The Ralph Retort, and saw retweets talking about a young girl/woman. My still fever-fuzzy brain thought “…I hope they don’t think this is current events.” (I’m still fever-fuzzy.)

 

That’s my graduating year ID – lucky it was where I remembered it was. I blacked out my ex’s surname – yes, I was married then to someone else; our marriage was on the rocks and we separated before I graduated and eventually divorced – He was American so he could divorce me; the Philippines does not have divorce for anyone who isn’t Muslim and that is a rant for a different day. I visited Australia in 2004 and Rhys and I have been together since. My ex and I still talk on occasion, and we both agree that we’re in better places than we were before and we wish each other happy.

This happened while I was still in college. I went for six years from 1998 to 2004, not because that’s the required time to put in, but rather because as an ‘irregular student’, I didn’t have the per-assigned hours and classes that regular block students did. I started in the second semester, not the first, of the last co-ed school ‘batch’ before Miriam fully reverted to being an all girl’s college. So I had to try grab the empty slots for my required major and minor classes if they were still available, or if they weren’t, I’d take them next year. This caused some issues as …I think it was calculus?… was dropped while I was attending (Miriam did not offer hard science or engineering majors at the time – that may have changed now) so other than Algebra or Statistics, there was no need for it – and it had been on my curriculum list when I entered. So I had the strangest schedule sometimes. The history classes were supposed to be spread across the first three years; I got them all on my second semester. Unfortunately I had a very boring World History teacher – one of those people who focused more on geography and dates and timelines as opposed to bringing the events to life in the classroom. Philippine history and Asian Civilization was fun, especially Philippine History, because that was taught by someone who became one of my favorite teachers ever. A tale for a different day.

I wrote as much as I could remember – this would have happened sometime between 2000-2002 or 2003, so I’m afraid that I don’t remember things like names any more. I’ve always been bad with them, so I’m sorry, I can’t point you to a particular lecturer, I remember only that the two Indian women were the most outspoken of the four or five guests up on that stage. They’re a lot like the typical militant feminist common today, just without the rainbow hair.

I forgot to include the parts where I argued extensively about how could they simply shove aside half the human population and dismiss them as rapists when surely all of us present knew of good men, were related to them, and had good male friends. How were we supposed to become good parents to sons, if we treated them with suspicion simply because they were born the opposite sex? I suppose most of the details have gotten hazy in the back and forth shouting. But I remember that fury, the feel of my sense of restraint breaking one chain at a time with each outrageous thing that the feminist lecturers were verbally heaping on our heads – and trying to crush our spirits with. In a way, they did us a favor by overplaying their hand; that particular batch of students were never feminists of the type that seem so prevalent today.

I have good memories, for the most part, of my college years in Miriam. I liked most of my professors and had problems only with the Statistics teacher and the hard-line socialist who was very upset that I didn’t paint a shining picture of glorious utopia after finding out I’d lived in East Berlin. In fact, I don’t really have bad memories of Women Studies classes either – and I know now I was very lucky in that respect. It was a lot more classical feminist than the fainting couch paternalism-encouraging Third Wave weaklings. The focus was more of being able to improve conditions for women and push for a more egalitarian outlook on a local scale. In some respects that is correct and indeed a good thing to advocate. In some other respects however, I don’t think it really applies to a lot of the Filipino outlook either honestly, but that’s the topic of my next essay, which I’m still in the process of writing.

 

First though I have to make sure I don’t relapse.