I don't recall any role models from my youth (70s-80s) that reflected the person that I was, or seemed to want to become, or in fact became today.

As a tall white adolescent male in the United States of that era all of my look-alikes on TV and in the movies and books were either alpha-males, tragically failed alpha-males (including nerds, scientists, the mentally ill, clowns and comic relief), or villains.

This is the white patriarchy at work breeding the new generation, of course. If you're a white man, and you're not in charge (either a good boss or a bad boss), you're a fuck-up.

There may have been the occasional funny or clever shy introvert in an ensemble cast presented at least in a non-disparaging way, but really I'm hard pressed to think of an example other than Mission Impossible where everyone's traits were considered useful, no matter how non-mainstream (And Barney the genius electronics guy was black, too, which was pretty good for the era).

Most media was (and continues to be) about The Alpha Guy doing Alpha Stuff in an Alpha Way. 

I think perhaps one of the reasons guys of a certain age who don't do a lot of introspection have a hard time with feminism is because they just don't know how to act in a world where people who look like them aren't always the Alpha Guy doing Alpha Stuff in an Alpha Way.

Most of the time people just play the role they learned before they were 20. If they never learned a role other than Alpha Guy, even if they're shitty at playing it, they will probably find it hard to play another role.  (Which is a reason, not an excuse.) 

So, I encourage the creation of media where there are positive role models for all personality types as well as genders and ethnicities. And it's good to see that this is happening, to some degree, in modern media. But I think there's a lot more to be done. As there is with every other aspect of feminism.

One thing that struck me when watching Cesar Milan's the Dog Whisperer is how he coaches dog owners to gain dominance over their pets.  He can walk into a room full of out of control, crazy barking dogs.  Just by being calm and assertive he will bespell them into submission.  

That's how people work too, in my experience .  As a female gamer I often run into a group of random guys and am reminded of Cesar facing the dogpack.  When in an unfamiliar social situation, sometimes people will naturally bark and try to rattle each other to establish dominance.  Most people are fine with not being the alpha (fe)male as long as their place in the pack feels right to them.  It's not knowing who's in charge often makes people restless and insecure, I think.  They bark, troll, try to see if they can make me lose my cool.  They're not being cruel or misogynistic in my view, they'd treat new guys the same way.  It's just human nature.  People need to feel social order on an emotional level or they will do what comes naturally to try to establish it.  When we interact with new people in real life, we do it subconsciously through body language and other visual cues but online, we only have words.  

So when someone's trolling, the way I see it is they're basically barking at me online.  They're trying to make me lose my cool, trying to assert dominance over me. If I let them rattle me and got angry at them, they'd win the dominance mini-game round we've just played.  If I return the serve with humor and grace they might keep trying but as long as no one gets angry or hurt, no one loses.

As a manager and guild leader I've had to play this game many times.  I actually enjoy it when I know the people involved and know that no one's feelings will really be affected.  Then it's a harmless test of will and spirit.  

Sometimes innocent bystanders have seen me and a bunch of crude gamer guys trash-talking each other and been alarmed, leaping to my defense.  Once one of my opponents in a game made a hilarious youtube video about a beanie baby cougar he named after my game character and then ritually beheaded...  Well, I thought it was hilarious!  I knew he wasn't serious.  In the context of the game we were bitter rivals.  Outside of the game, we became friends and remain so to this day.  

Er, but other people thought maybe I should call the cops just in case.  They were really upset by it.

So, he probably shouldn't have made that video right?  I should have been upset by it too?

Well, maybe.  But I knew he was just trying to troll me.  I trolled him back with a witty forum post.  Fun was had.   No anger required.

And now, Sol (3 mos) and Boots (1 year)

Do I win for first pic of food on OPW?

Watching: Just finished the second episode of Babylon 5 Season 2.  After a full season of Commander Sinclair, it's always a bit jarring when we get to Captain Sheridan; mostly it's the voice, I think, probably an octave higher and rough instead of smooth.  But Sheridan's already got more depth to his character, and the writing seems much better; the plot has hit the ground running.

My wife and I also watched the first episode of "Outlander"; she's a big fan of the Diana Gabaldon books they're based on, and I have read and enjoyed them as well.  It seemed okay to start with, not as off-putting as I found "Bitten" or "True Blood", so I'm sure we'll keep on.

Reading: Slogging through The Talisman by Stephen King & Peter Straub.  Never read any Straub, but I've read a fair chunk of King by this point, and I frankly can't point to anything that doesn't read like him.  But I'm not enjoying it that much; our main character is a little too hapless, and just when he seems to be ramping up his confidence slightly he gets saddled with a hapless companion.  Part of this book almost seem like a dry run for the Dark Tower.  Not sure if I'll keep it when I finish, or if I'll want to try to the sequel I seem to recall they came out with a few years ago.  Also inching through What If The Earth Had Two Moons?, which is fitfully interesting, but today I've been trying to catch up on Cracked.com columns, which I seem to have become a dedicated reader of.

Listening: Mostly Rush's "Vapour Trails" recently.  I skipped over this one when it came out, mostly because on first listen it seemed horrifically noisy, something I'd been afraid of since "Stick It Out".  It became available on eMusic, though, so I thought I'd give it a try.  A fellow Rush fan that I met at my wife's family reunion said they had come out with a less noisy version, so maybe I managed to get that one by chance.  (I did like "Snakes & Arrows", which gave me the impetus to try again, and one of these days I should try "Clockwork Angels", too.)  I also have Sloan's "Between The Bridges" coming up soon; Sloan's a band I find hit-and-miss, but I read a gushy chapter on them in a book on Canadian alternative music a few months back, and since they're on eMusic too, I thought I'd give them another try.

Playing: For several months now my brain has been mostly dominated by Paradox Games's offerings, specifically Crusader Kings II and Europa Universalis IV.  I could write a big long blog post about my games, but let's just say that at the moment I am experimenting with EU4 games created from my CK2 save files, and having a lot of fun with it.

I've also been spending an embarrassing amount of time playing with Akinator, a guessing game with a genie, bad English, and a bit more than twenty questions.  It only guesses characters--both real and fictional--but I've become caught up in the question of which characters it knows about, and then which ones are most popular (because it tells you how many times it's been guessed before...).  I now have several pages of numbers, character from different sources and their respective popularities.  Akinator the genie itself is at the top, followed by Hitler and Jesus, unless there's other obvious ones I haven't tried yet.  I'm sure it'll pall eventually, but at least it keeps from playing more Candy Crush Saga on my iPod.

When my partner and I sit down to play Final Fantasy RPGs together (one person driving, one person navigating or commenting), sometimes about when one of us gets bored/fed-up, the other one will be quite interested and eager to play. So the controller gets handed over and the driver/navigator roles switch. And sometimes, when the new driver gets bored, the navigator will be keen to drive once again.

Occasionally, like tonight, this role swapping will go back and forth several times, causing video game sessions hours longer than they would otherwise naturally be if only one person was (sensibly) playing until they were bored and then stopping.

It's not like FFn is particularly riveting, it's just kind of got that scratch-an-itchiness about it that suggests that just a couple minutes more might be nice. And then it's an hour past your bedtime.

It's okay, we're adults, we can stop any time. 

Last night I fell asleep dreaming of pixels. Two of them. Two pixels. Well, one, and then two. Actually, last night I fell asleep thinking I should get up and work on the fucking pixels because the work I was doing on sleep wasn't going very well either.

But then it was morning. Which was good.

Chrome, you see, had two pixels, Safari had zero, and Firefox had one. (Which is hilarious in a way because Safari and Chrome are almost the same browser.) CSS is supposed to make these problems not happen. But of course they do. Because designers need steady jobs, just like everyone else. (You're telling me that isn't someone's rationale?!) 

And what kind of struck me about CSS is that it's like a lot of things. You can be angry and harsh and define every fucking thing about every margin and div and font size and whatever and force it to be exactly what you want. Or you can be chill and zen and take the "yeah as long as it looks good, it doesn't have to be exactly the same on every browser" route.

Which as an attitude is in the long run much healthier for your soul. 

So what happens is when you finally decide that being angry about everything not being perfect just isn't going ever going to work and you strip out all the crap and start from scratch is just about when you find the zen-like magic incantation that not only gives you exactly what you were fighting for in the first place, but makes all of the browsers render it exactly the same way. (For the record, that would be putting the fixed font-size on the enclosing UL rather than the LI items within it.)

So that was my little bop on the nose from the Buddha for today.

(*CSS is cascading style sheets, a kind of computer language used to describe how a web page should look, as opposed to specifying what the content words & images should be.)

This sounds like a fine thing, a little drop of social media without trying to sip from the firehose.  I love my friends but I don't have the time to sift through their forwarded funny pictures and weird news stories.  

So, the Kickstarter for my game Avalon Lords officially ended today, about $105k short of our goal.  But on the glass is 1/3 full side of things, friends and strangers pledged $45k to my cause.  And the Steam greenlight campaign is up to 10k "yes I would buy this game" votes!  It's hard not feeling down because the Kickstarter failed, but I will just look at funny pictures and read weird news stories until I jolly back up.

BTW, hello!  I'm the lead game designer and COO for a little game development studio, in addition to doing web development and IT management for an employee benefits company and doting on partners, pets and friends.  When I have any free minutes I derive a great deal of satisfaction wrecking guys in multiplayer strategy games.  

Boots, 1-year old ginger tom-kitten

I think there's a tendency among readers of books to underestimate the value of a good editor. I know for many years I had no idea that books even needed to be edited. And then for a while being reviled at the thought that someone might dare to touch my words. 

But now I realize the value of having someone review your work and saying, "hey, that thing you're obviously in love with, it's okay to be in love with it, but no one else is really going to care that much, so cut it short, okay?" or "what the hell that doesn't make any sense?" or "TOOT TOOT hello I am the QE2 and I am going TOOT TOOT through your plot holes."

I'd like to think that as one's experience as an artistic creator progresses, one is able to look at one's own work with more objectivity and to easily accept the input of others. But then I'd also like to think that creating art should be about making what I want, not what anyone else wants, so fuck objectivity. Which put together have that great push/pull dynamic of any great chaotic system.

In conclusion, yay art and yay collaborators.

I'm reading FB posts and chatting with teacher friends all of whom have bid (or are about to bid) a fond farewell to a brief summer. Yesterday, I saw approximately half-a-gazillion "First day of school" pics, and I'm sure next week's feed will feature the other half-a-gazillion pics. Interesting how many districts return pre-Labor vs. post-Labor Day...

This is my first year in 14 years where I'm not standing in front of a classroom every day. Feels weird. Freeing, a bit, but also mildly nerve-wracking. I'm only teaching one night class at Cedar Crest College each semester this year, and striking out as a freelance writer. Fortunately, I've a good, long 5-month contract that starts the end of September, but oy - what to do until then... or after?!

I've hooked up with a resume-writing company. The pay's not bad when the workload's decent - they're still "easing me in," and I'm hoping to get hit with more orders soon. 

Yesterday, a good friend told me that her husband - a jewelry designer by trade-turned-construction-worker - was just offered a position designing a line of 25+ engagement rings for the Astor diamond clan. Epic. Another friend started her dream job as director of multimedia/ content at Whole Foods. A former student landed a great position at an elementary school a few months after moving to Arizona.

Hearing these great stories gives me hope that, as I continue my search for writing gigs, I'll find one (or several) that brings me joy, intellectual challenge, financial stability, and satisfaction knowing it's something I can do - and do well!

I love most of what PKD has written, but  a few things stick out. Once I discovered Confessions of a Crap Artist I always felt it was my favorite.  His only "mainstream fiction", but still written in his style; I felt it was like a pocketknife. The ideas I discovered in it were everyday useful, and changed my life in a small but important way.

But I just restarted rereading the Valis trilogy: Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. Now I remember that compared to that little pocketknife of pratical wisdom it's a thermonuclear chainsaw capable of opening The Universe up and showing its guts.

As you might expect, they both get my highest recommendation.