The Wolfcave

Because my ass is too lazy to be explaining them all the time and I am sick and fucking tired of sending people to the userinfo. These are the rules of this space which is mine and you will abide by them or you will get the fuck out:

Wolfie's (Original) Rules
1. This is my journal. I run it. That means it's my space, so you will respect my rules even if you don't like or agree with them. If you're not okay with that, nobody is forcing you to be in my space. In the words of an old friend of mine from many years ago, if you don't like it, GTFO.
2. When I say something about rape, I'm not looking for debate. You are not going to change my mind about what I think is and is not rape. This goes for what I think is and is not misogyny as well, and for what I think is and is not oppression, and you know what, basically if I make a statement (not a question) in an entry and your comment is intended to convince me why I am wrong about it, you need to reevaluate why you're here. Back to rule #1: my space, my thoughts, my message. You want to bloviate about why something isn't really rape or whatever, do it on your own damn journal.
3. If you and I are fandom friends, don't assume that makes us feminism friends. I may like and respect you but it doesn't mean I agree with you or even that I should. One of the concessions I make for my own survival under the patriarchy is that I'm friends with a lot of people I consider at least passively misogynist. This may or may not include you, but if you really really disagree with radical feminist theory, and/or if you consider yourself "sex positive" (which is a bullshit term on the level of "pro-life"), it's a pretty safe bet that it does. So if I tell you you don't get it, back off. I don't want to start having to defriend people but I will do it to protect my space.
4. I have been reading Twisty Faster for nearly a year now. I agree with damn near everything she says. If you don't understand why I would say some particular thing, you ought to go read Twisty for a couple of months and see if you get it then.
5. All of which is to say, no concern trolling. In fact, why not go whole hog, no trolling full stop.
6. There is no Rule 6.
7. The Wolf reserves the right to make up rules on the spot. This goes back to rule #1, too--my space, what I say goes. If I tell you to stop doing something, stop doing it.

The Additional Rules That Came Along Later
- Anonymous comments violating Rule #2 in such a way that demonstrates offensive levels of misogyny, regardless of the stated gender of the anonymous commenter (because here at the Wolfcave we recognize that women can and do internalize misogyny at offensive levels), will be summarily deleted. The Wolf reserves the final say on what does and does not count as an offensive level of misogyny.
- Calling me (or anyone) "crazy" is explicitly ableist and discriminatory against people with mental illnesses, and is therefore self-evidently unacceptable.
- You're goddamn right I'm stifling dissent. I am not the U.S. government. I am under no obligation to allow you freedom of speech.
- If you don't like it you can get your own motherfucking blog, asshole!
- Commenting anonymously is a privilege, not a right. I will revoke it if you (in the plural) are big enough assholes. Give me a reason, I swear to god, I am this close to disallowing anonymous comments already. Anonymous comments are not allowed. I have been burned by the shit in the past and you will suck it up.
- THIS IS NOT THE FEMINISM 101 BLOG. Do not ask me Feminism 101 shit. Do your own motherfucking research. I am neither your professor, your library nor your search engine.

IF YOU COMMENT ON THIS JOURNAL, YOU ARE AGREEING TO THESE RULES. I WILL BAN YOUR ASS IF YOU FAIL TO COMPLY: BE TOLD.

I have never had this kind of anniversary before.

I was never close to my grandparents. I couldn’t tell you when they died, except that for my mom’s parents I was in middle school and they went about six months apart, and for my dad’s mom I had to work so I didn’t go to the funeral.

It’s a strange feeling, for those of you who haven’t experienced it, to have another date added to the holidays and birthdays that you remember by default: my birthday is September 16th, Kate’s is September 20th, April’s is June 29th, Dad’s is January 20th, Mom’s is January 28th, Christmas is December 25th, Halloween is October 31st, Mom died on July 25th.

There will never be another, larger meaning to this date. If, G-d forbid, some national tragedy, some natural disaster happens on July 25th, if a war starts or ends, if I make a new close friend or fall in love with someone who was born on this date, or if someone I love gets married or has a baby on this date, it will still always be the day Mom died.

It was about now, I think, about three in the afternoon, that we came home from the grocery store, and we had had such a good trip to the grocery store, we had been in such a wonderful mood. Mike hadn’t been yelling at me, good things had been on sale, it was a lovely day and we were talking and laughing and she was already dead and I didn’t know it. I don’t know what time it was when I got the call. When Aunt Pam said, “I’m Mike’s sister,” I was so confused, I knew from her voice, in my gut, I knew something terrible had happened, but I thought she meant my husband mike, and not my stepdad Mike. My brain went, but he doesn’t have a sister.

And when she said, “Mike and Karen were killed in a motorcycle accident,” for a moment I didn’t know who she was talking about. I thought she had the wrong number.

I thought, “Who’s Karen,” for a moment, because of course in my head her name will always be Mom.

If any of you are wondering, it doesn’t go away. It gets easier but it doesn’t end. You still think to yourself, maybe they’re playing an elaborate prank on us, maybe there’s been a terrible mistake and the people on that bike weren’t Mike and Karen at all. They’re old hippies, they’re free spirits, maybe they fucked off to Machu Picchu or something and I’ll get a call tomorrow going, why are you selling our house. You know it isn’t true but part of you still thinks maybe.

I downloaded Twister because it was her favorite movie. I downloaded it that week. I still haven’t been able to watch it.

I don’t know what I’m trying to say, here. Maybe nothing. Maybe just to remember, to share a little bit of remembering with my dash. I’ve never done this before and I’m all alone right now and there’s nobody else to tell.

So I’ll tell you how easily she laughed, how much she snarked at everything, how she smoke like a chimney and drank like a fish and maybe her cholesterol was a little high but she didn’t have any other health problems, she was fit and happy and living the life she loved. I’ll tell how proud she would have been that I’ll have my associate’s soon, and that I’ll be going back to a four-year school in January, ready to get my bachelor’s and move on to grad school. How proud she’d be of me for leaving this marriage even though it’s hard. For taking care of this dog even though it’s a lot of work. For figuring out who I am, even though nobody is here to tell me how.

How proud she was already, of my sister and me, just for living grown and mostly happy in the world.

I’ll tell you how she is the only person in my family I ever came out to, and how she said she didn’t care if I was holding hands with a boy or a girl as long as I was happy. How she always had advice even when I wasn’t looking for any, and how she was usually right even when I didn’t want her to be. How fully she lived, how deeply she loved, how bright she burned when she was with us, how bright she still burns now that she’s gone. How, in some ways, she isn’t really gone at all.

I carry her heart with me (I carry it in my heart). And on my back as I prepare to leave this home I’ve spent three years making, I carry her love and her paintings and her stand mixer and a lock of her hair, I carry them into my new future and she comes with me. So maybe I’m all alone right now, and maybe I’m not, and maybe I never will be.

So maybe nothing will ever be the same again. And maybe that’s okay.

The bakery here in Mackinaw City is open. I told the girls that if I was up super early again I would bring them coffee and donuts, so I've texted Molly to get her and Cheryl's drink orders. They are probably not up yet; I'll just sit here and wait, and if I don't hear from them by the time the donuts are up, I'll bring back four mochas.

( I've picked up a copy of the Fort Michilimackinac Pageant Gazette for the 2012 season. )

For the kids who deployed just after high school, ready to give their service to pay for a college education, who never came home.

For the sons and daughters whose parents had to get the phone call, and the parents who had to answer it.

For the parents who will forever miss birthdays and holidays, who didn't see their babies born or didn't see their first steps or didn't see them off to kindergarten.

For the brothers and sisters who will always be missing from family reunions; for the spaces left by silent agreement in wedding photos.

For the empty chair at the table and the empty side of the bed.

For the extra drink at the bar that friends order in solemn tribute, to pour out or drink as is their tradition, one for me, one for you.

For those who are gone, and for those left behind. For those who know this day is about more important things than parades and a day off and a sale at the store.

For your service.

For your sacrifice.

Thank you.

Beta spoilers, because that's how I roll.

I get that we are limited by the genre of the game, but I really feel like we should not be able to fight the Sha, or at least the Sha of Anger and the Sha of Hatred, by actually...fighting them. Or, I mean. Maybe we try it once or twice and it just feeds them.

It shouldn't work, is what I'm saying.

It should be like in You Awaken in Razor Hill: "You can't possibly stop this with more violence."

I could see it working on Doubt, but there should be some kind of tie-in with that in the later zones where we find out that by using violence to defeat the Sha of Doubt we have strengthened Anger and Hatred. Because that's how that would work. We are failing at balance and I get that this is Warcraft and that there's really not another way they could go on this, from a gameplay standpoint, but storywise it just feels wrong.

Anyway. I'm not posting this in the Beta Feedback forum because there would be no point, but that's my take on it.

Incidentally I really love the Sha as the focus of the expansion, especially against the backdrop of a bunch of haters blathering on about how this expansion is too lighthearted and "should be rated E" and whatever-all. Because yes, on the surface, this expansion is about happy bouncy pandas who like to get drunk (but are always happy drunks, they don't get maudlin or go home and beat their families or anything), but if you look just a little deeper, this expansion is the darkest yet.

Yes, we've fought deeply evil things before. We've fought characters who were created to be good but got twisted into evil, who want to blacken and destroy everything their hands can reach, but those characters have always been outside us. We were always the good guys, and maybe once in a while we got manipulated into doing something evil and had to atone for that but at the end of the day we were the heroes and they were the villains and there was always that line of demarcation there.

(My deep and abiding love for death knights comes mostly from the fact that death knights, more than any other class, blur that line.)

But this time, this time, it's not some Big Bad trying to destroy the world, it's not about some evil master plan that we're being manipulated into furthering. The evil comes from us. We brought it with us to this new land that we've discovered and we didn't do it because somebody wanted to use us for their own evil ends, we did it because we're a bunch of petty squabbling assholes who hate each other for no better reason than that we're different. And because of our stupid, self-centered, ignorant, violent bullshit, we have made manifest the Sha to destroy homes and lives and families across a continent of people who offered us only friendship and booze.

We are the bad guys this time. We have to take down the evil not because we're heroes and that's what we do, but because we caused it, it's our fault, and we have to clean up our mess. Because nothing will make up for what has already been lost to our shortsightedness but we have to stop the destruction before it's too late.

Because whining that we didn't know, that we didn't mean any harm, accomplishes nothing. Because intent is not magic. We have to fix it. We have to roll up our sleeves and do it ourselves. Are we the heroes who have saved Azeroth so many times before? Time to fucking act like it.

Guys I'm having a Pandaren existential crisis.

I've had the name Tophbeifong reserved on my server for months for my female Pandaren monk. The trouble is, now that I've seen the model with the long tail¹, I can't get Ty Lee out of my head.

I'm compulsively drawing pictures of red Pandaren women in acrobatic poses with cheerful, mischievous expressions and long braids.

And I keep telling myself, it'll be okay, I'll have another character slot when the xpac goes live, I can roll them both, but then I start worrying someone else will get Tylee as a name before I can. And so I think, what other character can I delete to make room to reserve the name, and I don't know and just ugh what do I do.

Intellectually I know I am not going to level two Alliance monks. I'm just not. I need to get over it, really. As much as I love Tophgod (because who doesn't) I am not going to play her. I need to delete her placeholder and make one for Ty Lee and get over myself. The longer I dither, the greater the chance someone else will have the name on my server.

1. People keep saying the red females are the only Pandaren with tails, and this is simply not the case. All Pandaren have tails. The black-and-whites simply have the little teeny round short tails.

Here's WoW Insider's article, including pics.

1. It comes in red! I'm super excited about the red panda option. SUPER SUPER EXCITE U GUISE OMG. I'm not sure if I'll actually play one or not, but I think it's awesome regardless.

2. Fat-bottomed girls do make the panda world go 'round. When we got the silhouette, there were a lot of people saying she was still skinnier than they'd like, and I would have thought it was cool if they had gone fatter with her as well, but compared to the male model I call her just fine. WoW female characters are always skinnier than the males; her slenderness in comparison can, I think, be attributed to compacter muscles underneath her padding, which is fine with me. And do I spy a bit of a belly? I do! I do! Love.

3. HAIR TOYS Some of the hair options are going to have hair sticks. YES PLEASE. Is it wrong to hope we'll see one or two of those in the barber shop for other races?

Tophbeifong is gonna be the coolest looking toon on my character selection screen, you guys.

In my twenty-nine years I have encountered five stories that have changed my life and the way I looked at the world. The first was Lord of the Rings. The second was Harry Potter. The third was Women On Fire. The fourth was Discworld. The fifth was You Awaken in Razor Hill.

If you play WoW, and you haven't read it, you need to follow that link right now.

If you don't play WoW, I really recommend that you read it anyway, although it may make you want to play WoW, so fair warning on that.

If you are a Supernatural fan, I can tell you that SPN gives me the same kinds of feelings as reading this story, so check that out.

I don't have a lot of homework this weekend, so I'll have time to reread it. And then I'm going to go in-game to pay my respects to certain NPCs and a certain grave site.

Good morning, friends, and happy Friday the 13th!

It's the last Friday before the spring semester. Well, technically they call it the winter semester--whatever, I don't even, it doesn't matter. It ends in spring, and I like spring better, so I think of it as spring.

I have a number of strategies in place to ensure this semester goes better than last semester. I am going to email my dad my syllabi and all my homework assignments and I'm going to talk to him every night before I go to bed. That way someone is there for me to be accountable to and I won't have the leeway to bullshit.

I've got the debit card for my new bank account. It's sitting in my wallet and I hope not to have to use it until I actually move out, but my paychecks are going into its checking account so there's money there if I need it. When I get my financial aid refund this semester that will go into savings.

Nigel is being a jackass about his plans to grow medical marijuana for money. He seems to think we are going to use our tax refund as a down payment on a house where he can set up a grow room. He is mistaken. I am perfectly happy to put it in a savings account and play along with whatever house hunting he wants to do, because there is no way we'll find something he's happy with in our price range by the time I'm ready to leave. Then when we get divorced I will take my half of the money in that joint account and he can suck my entire ass.

The dent from my wedding ring is almost gone, and I have stopped reaching over to adjust the ring. Meanwhile not wearing it has begun affording me opportunities to practice being hit on, which is fun. I'm not stupid enough to cheat but it's nice to get attention.

Nigel, meanwhile, may in fact be stupid enough to cheat. Last weekend he made a mix CD for someone at his work, but he wouldn't tell me who or why or what was on it and when he played it to make sure it had burned correctly he plugged his headphones into the CD player. When I, in completely casual I'm-just-making-conversation tones, inquired as to why he was making it, he got extremely defensive.

Which is hilarious.

As of tomorrow it will be eleven months since we had sex.

In not-my-fucked-up-marriage news, I have been doing some cooking. The other day I made chocolate ganache for hot chocolate purposes and today I'm going to make a chocolate pound cake to drizzle some of it over. I've also been doing things with the crock pot that result in deliciousness with very little effort.

I'm going to spend my time and energy on schoolwork and taking care of myself and Chromie to the exclusion of dealing with Nigel's bullshit and in order to make the time pass quickly so that I'll be graduating and moving out before I know it. I'm going to get my 4.0 back, get/keep myself and my dog healthy and happy, rehabilitate my wardrobe so that I have things to wear that I like that actually fit me, and "get organized" (read: subtly pack all my shit so I can move out while Nigel is at work when the time comes).

I really really hope someone buys Mom's house soon. The real estate market in Florida is not great but if it sells I can just move out basically right then and not have to wait until I finish my degree.

Meanwhile I have some vacation and personal time at work that I need to take by the end of the month or it goes away. Basically it's about nine and a half hours of free money, so I'm going to stick that in the book and receive a paycheck while sitting at home on my ass doing schoolwork. Fun times.