Star Crossed Musing

I've lost about five pounds, give or take. That doesn't seem like much, and given the vagaries of the female body and water retention it's really not, but it's a start. I'll feel better about it when I get to ten. It's much harder to write of ten as "not real change," which is a huge bugaboo for me when dealing with weight loss. Even more than a shift in numbers, though, I'm fitting into pants I was last able to wear last summer. That's pretty spiffy, all things considered.

So, for those of you who are more recent readers of my blog (I think there might be a whole three of you :)), I have over the past few years run a sporadic Dresden Files game which I call Rising Waters. It's set in Baltimore, and it has a motley collection of characters. It keeps going on hiatus as real life and grad school intervene, but my players, God love them, seem to enjoy it and always want me to pick it back up again. I'm therefore running it once more, picking back up from where we left off six months ago. For previous sessions, please see the "Rising Waters" tag on my blog -- that'll give you the character backgrounds, etc. So. When last we left our intrepid heroes, we were roughly a week out from Midsummer, which means a week out from Uno's engagement party to the summer lady. Dylan had just finished working to create a diving bell/old-fashioned submarine, which he planned to use to find evidence of ghouls in the river off Fells Point. We met tw...

This is the best damn cheesecake I have ever made. I win. Note: potential eating disorder triggers below. I've never had an eating disorder. If anything, I've let myself go the opposite direction. I'm overweight by something like 60 lbs, by my reckoning, though if you were to ask a physician based solely on BMI, they'd likely say something closer to 80 lbs. I have scoliosis and my ankles are prone to giving me hell, and in recent years I've heard a mysterious crackling sound in one knee. I also have high blood pressure, currently controlled through medication, and a history of heart disease and stroke in my family. I really need to lose some goddamn weight, as Patton Oswalt would say. My aunt, on the other hand, did have an eating disorder. She was 10 years older than I was at the time I remember figuring out something was wrong, which puts her in high school while I was in grade school. She would eat almost nothing, and it was typically a fight to get an...

Seems that way to me, at least. And I've got so much to post about! I've had a semester, and went to New Orleans, and worked on Chill, and had my kids out for spring break, and and and.... whew. No wonder I feel like I just rode a whirlwind. I'll get it all sorted and post something more meaningful about all of it soon, however. For today, I want to talk about this: Stuff for Girls. So, Chuck Wendig wrote a great piece here , like he does. And in doing so, he points out (without getting all about the menz) how gender divisions can run the risk of reinforcing stereotypes for men even with the best intentions. He gets why having something called out in specific invitation of girls is important, but at the same time, it has the possibility of "ghetto"-izing an intended audience and the material designed for it, rendering it "off-limits" to the mainstream, and hence keeping it from both being normalized and educating those who need to see what it's l...

In other words, I'm in New Orleans at the Popular Culture/American Culture Associations' national conference. It should be noted that early April is apparently a lovely time to visit, as it's warm but not hot, and the air is humid, but doesn't feel like you're trying to breathe honey. It's day two of the conference (I presented morning of day one) and I've seen a lot of really insightful game studies and gothic panels, as well as one that was possibly the most valuable to me, on using Native American cultures and literature respectfully and usefully in the classroom. Although the conference is ongoing today, I am spending it in my room, away from all the lovely panels and the book dealers. This is because today I hit the "like hell" wall, by which I mean my body, without checking with me first, decided it was done with the people and the noise and the weird chairs and pretty much any dairy whatsoever. I was retaining a lot of water and my blood p...

On Facebook,  Chuck Wendig  pointed out a controversy involving a YA author named Andrew Smith. I do not read a lot of YA fiction currently (heck, I don't read a lot of non-eighteenth-century fiction currently -- grad school will do that to you) but I'm told that his work is very good. Recently he did an interview online where in he made a sort-of-odd statement in response to being asked where all the women were in his work. Thanks to a tumblr post then commenting on the inherent sexism its author saw in Smith's response, the YA world on the Internet apparently blew up. Smith's books are YA fiction for boys, about boys, with all the questioning of sexuality and what it means to be a man and how to find your own way in a world that is anything but clear that would seem inherent in that. There are apparently women in them, but as secondary characters at best. In today's female saturated YA market, that means his books are actually pretty unusual -- boys are not the...

So, I have hit a new game design threshold today -- I found a game system that I appreciate as a player, but I have no real interest in designing anything for it, as does the thing it does and doesn't have a lot of room for customization. That's not a bad thing, especially if your goals for game theme line up with the themes of that rules system. I'm a hippy indie gamer at heart, though, apparently, and I really have a thing for custom (or customized) rules systems that focus on bringing out a particular feel in a game. This is not to say that universal systems are bad, but rather that they aren't my choice anymore -- and I say that as someone who came up in the industry during the d20 boom. I mention this primarily because I think one of the underrated things about game design, particularly as a woman in game design, is having opinions about games. And I don't mean ethical or cultural or feminist opinions, because those are actually expected and hang like neat ...