Liralen's Adventures Through Life

It's been a while since I've written anything, really...  I've been gaming instead, and letting that use my hands and mind up enough that I didn't really think about it. There's something that I love about being able to turn my mind off in the middle of a game.  Just exist and do for a while and not have to feel or think. And, even then, I find that I have to create things, so I've been making my YouTube channel work.  But I really miss my accounts of all my travels. We've been traveling a lot lately.  Via my Obsidian notes on my packing lists, we hit eight different cities last year, and this year we've already been to nine with at least two more bigger trips before the end of the year, and possibly another, depending on how schedules go. And I only have pictures in Google and some photo collections on Facebook to remember what it was like. And I'm pretty sure I hate that. I also hate NOT having an account of my real life again with all the bumps a...

 ... are very much less well defined than others. With the combination of being thoroughly retired and COVID, most of the days don't have a lot of structure and sometimes I accidentally add to that by just not being terribly well organized or having much of a plan or priority for anything. Mostly because I don't have to?  But it helps having outside input now and again, or external deadlines that reflect on what I need to get done. One of the recent deadlines was an October art show with my church, and instead of showing the paintings within the building of the church, all the artists were asked to either provide a video or send pictures of their art and some preferred music to Karina Doyle, who did the video for the Puerto Rico mission trip. She does good work. I, however, decided I wanted to do my own, and I'd even contacted Cynthia Lin of U3. They'd just put out an album called "In Waves". I'd been following her ukulele lessons on YouTube, and loved her...

I know, I know, it's been a long time since I've written, and it seems an odd place to start: why I failed to write. But I think that knowing why I failed and stopped for so long, and understanding it is really the only way I can figure out how to avoid those failure modes and get back to writing in a way that rewards me again. I know that, for the longest time, the main reason I blogged was because I could remember what good thing happened that day. Most of my blog in the 80's and 90's was in order to fight depression and to keep an on-going record of the adventures and miracles of each day. When I gave birth to Jet, I wanted to remember all that was going on and how my baby was growing. Laurie Santos, the seven step program, Kurzgesagt, AAA, and all kinds of research show the importance of "gratitude" in the quality of everyday life. Not the "be grateful to God" religious gratitude, but the everyday, every person kind of thanks that can be given to...

The hardest thing about posting intermittently, compared to when I was doing it every day, is that there are so many things I want to talk about, but jumbling them all together feels like a mashup that has no real point. The things that are on my mind at the moment include: The road trip to the Canadian Rockies that we did, which is more of a picture album kind of thing, where I get to talk a bit about the rewards of each day. Our in-between time for the two houses, and the unexpected gifts that have come with that time. My summer with Jet before he goes off to college, which might fit a little with the first point. Various culinary adventures we've had in Karen's kitchen, which can also be a pictures and linear telling kind of thing. The odd revelation that if I take Christian Teachings from the angle of it being about community, NOT about individual behavior (under the creepy stalker eye of a god that immediately punishes or rewards said behavior) all kinds of things...

One of those odd things, that I've been wanting to write about for some time, has been about gender boundaries. About the spaces where I've been walking that seem exclusive to one gender or the other. And I'm talking about a 100 to 1 ratio, on the most part. In fanfiction nearly everyone involved was female, or they were males who were transgender, they'd been born female and were moving toward what they felt was their true nature. The odd thing there, for me, was that they were firmly embedded in an all-female community and had few if no inclinations to move away from it. They might have to deal with everyday life as a male, but their online social life was nearly completely with women. Gamers are nearly all male. I know of three or four women who play, but they're few and far between, and I know more transgender females than I do ones that were born female. And, just like the transgenders in fanfiction, they're happier staying in the community that they ...

I spent nearly fourteen hours on ramen broth, yesterday. *laughs* I should have taken a picture or three, but it's a slow process. Momofuku Noodle Bar has a cookbook out that details it's exacting process for making ramen broth, and I follow all the bits but the bacon and I use bonito shavings instead of bacon. I also probably skim a little more fat off the broth than they do, but it's all to the good, and I don't put any salt in it so that when we eat it with our noodles, we add it then. I have a smoked salt that we love in it, along with the usual mirin, soy, and, when I have an extra chicken carcass leftover from making fried chicken or whatever, we do get tare of a sort. I needed the long slow process to get through more profile, and through a bunch of Rainbow 6 videos teaching me about how to learn maps and how to flank and how to play a more vertical game on the various maps. That's one of those things about Rainbow is that a lot of the floor can not ...

My characters are talking to me again. It's... kind of cool and kind of troublesome and kind of making me wonder what it is about just putting words to screen that wakes them up again. Though, to be honest, it was really the asthma that woke Ukitake up, and he was gently encouraging me to breathe slow and deep, to keep control of my breathing rather than letting the coughing take over while I was in my bed in the middle of the night and I really needed more sleep. It worked. Life and characters and creation is an odd mix. The one that has been waking up the most used to be my original twist on Kisuke (yes, equally intelligent and amoral, but lazy enough to stay on the right side of the law). A character that I signed over all rights to someone else; but... I still have an even older name, Argent, who has been in my head for a very long time. He's woken up and is watching me with sleepy gray eyes. He's been enjoying the Rainbow Six Siege games immensely. Just yesterda...

As can be surmised, I came back from the Florida trip in bad physical shape.  The funny thing was I am hurting where I wasn't hurting before the trip and things that had been hurting before the trip had stopped until I came back. Days of doing nothing but being in a car, watching kids, or walking my feet off used very different muscles and emotions and tendons than did sitting at my desk in my office for much of the time. And I had time to not only think, but talk with my husband about a few things that have been recurring thoughts. The foremost was that after spending most of my life using my blogs and journals to process my emotions, I've walked almost completely away from them for more than three years.  Some of the reasons were good ones, having to do with the change in how the Internet now works compared to what it used to be, where anyone could find out anything that I said about them if they took a moment to look.  I had a relative of mine tell me that they'd read ...

Today was one of those days.... I was added back onto the roster of my old 6's team, I got my bee allergy shot, I helped plan a siege defense, I got to play Rainbow Siege Six for the first time with my son and his friend, I had a last minute dental appointment with my periodontist that was nearly foiled by my GPS, and I might have a mild eye infection as well. But I got Dairy Queen and good gaming. I think I'm a little tired.

And now I am unofficially done with being moderator. I actually wrote my position out of the official governance, and when the present moderators got it put into effect, I was finally out of the job. So, some of it was that the Moderator Past (yes, I used to do a lot of Christmas Spirits jokes about the Moderator Elect, Moderator, and Moderator Past) was officially a part of the Cabinet for the years following their time in office. And in rewriting the governance, I wrote that position out.

Lots of socks. From Noro's Silk Garden Sock yarn, it's amazing stuff, and I've made Jet a pair and myself two pairs, and it's all because I got sucked into One Last Thing. The Governance retreat went really well, though, so I'm glad of that, and it was so positive, and we made huge headway into making things more workable, simpler, and more powerful on all sides of the table. I'm so glad of Kimberley Sherwood at Third Sector Group . They specialize in helping nonprofits with fundraising and governance, and she really understands the difference between regular non-profits and churches. There are significant differences, too.

Jet got a snow day for his birthday, yesterday, and we got a whole foot of the white stuff. Our neighbors got stuck in it right in front of our driveway, and Jet and I got on our cold gear, found our shovels, and went out and dug them out and pushed them onto two carpets they'd found to put under the front wheels. It worked, and they got home and into the garage just fine, but we decided that we were just going to hang out in the house all day.

And the Slate article is now live . It amuses me that on Facebook, my friends had it all over my timeline even before I had gotten the note from my editor that it was up. I loved little film montage they got for it, too. It's cool, too, to get to meet some of the people that read it, too.

I just sent off the first big edits for an article for Slate , solicited by the editor from "the Liralen who inspired Jordan." It's interesting realizing that that was more than thirty years ago, and how much I've changed since and how much I've done and gone through. And also how much the same I am as that ambitious girl who wanted to be an electrical engineer... And how much the world has changed since, too. It was also kind of cool, after all the writing I've done, that getting an article down to 1200 words was entirely doable, and dealing with Ms Bosch's edits makes me appreciate editors all the more. I've been spending the last two or three weeks working on our church's Fellowship Hall remodel, doing the things I do. The whole congregation helped with the demolition and it was fast, dirty, but safe work. I've managed to avoid most of the insulation, but did drywall, thousands of drywall screws, including ceiling screws, and then do...

Title : A Butterfly's Dream of Freedom Game System : Tenra Bansho Zero - a game system that does a fine job of emulating Japanese Manga/Anime story elements. Where Played : Big Bad Con 2013 The Players : GM - Carl Rigney, Genosuke - Kevan Forbes, Masagoro - Shaun Hayworth, Kansuke - Thomas Fraser, Winter's Blessing - myself. Author's Notes : This is a story that was inspired by the game we played last October. All of the dreams of memory were actually each character's Zero Act, all played as part of the character setup. I've interspersed them where they impact the story, but you can see how the Zero Act really does a lot to develop each character in individual play. Carl has gone over this once with his memories of the game and some telling points as to Goichi's motivations. Shuan gave me some very specific knowledge as to Masagoro's feelings at the very end, which I needed to clarify. Thank you both for your help!! And other than that it's writte...

I haven't been, actually, though I've been trying. Just wasn't trying very hard when I had Ready Player One on my Kindle last night, and I was down to the last few chapters and had to Finish it, so I was up until 2 am reading. It was good, not great. Simple YA with straightforward villains. Little depth, but it didn't need it, and it'll probably make a visually vivid, action-packed movie. Fun, especially with all the 80's pop culture references, great gaming references, and some lovely Nerd references, particularly the one about the protagonist's love interest being like Jordan from Real Genius . That made me laugh a lot. Thing is that it magic-wanded some very real and nasty technical problems that were mere extensions of problems that we already know about today, was a post-fossil fuels world that used unsustainable energy sources on an every day basis, and made a few social problems of today something that was still huge in twenty years. There... actua...

The high-desert moan of the wind has been omnipresent for the last week. The warm winds melted away the eight to ten inches of snow piled everywhere, other than in the most persistent shadows, still mounded with dirty ice. So the world, in the low slant of morning sun, was all the dusty taupe of Front Range winter. The trees were black lace against the grass and cold pale sky, and flocks of geese rose in deep V's heading, inevitably north. Their compasses already pointing toward a spring that still feels so far away. I was driving into the dispatch center. On the way I saw men in black suits, black cowboy hats, solid black boots, and long black dusters paler on the legs with the blowing dust and dirt. They were directing traffic for a funeral, and their worn, rugged faces were solemn, all stern comfort for those that turned into the parking lot of the funeral home. It was a gray as the landscape, a simple one-story building surrounded by blacktop and the brown gray dirt. I'...

It turns out that a group of people, intrigued by what Sir Conan Doyle wrote in his Sherlock Holmes stories (and misspelled it 'baritsu'), decided to do the historical research into the Victorian martial art of Bartitsu. A few of those historians were also practicing martial artists, and they gathered up all the materials and have started a school of neo-Bartitsu, what the art would have become if it were being practiced today... Last Saturday I attended a local "seminar" by Australian Tony Wolf, on the art and found that it was more of an all-day workout in the art itself. Tony is based in Chicago and is flying around the country promoting the art and his two volume compodium of all the historical kata of the art. He also has done a documentary titled Bartitsu: The Lost Martial Art of Sherlock Holmes.

I remember being a judge of a fanfiction story contest a while back, the people running it picked me because they liked my fanfiction stories, because I had been published, and they thought I knew something about the art of fanfiction, so that I should be useful as a judge. I couldn't fault them for their judgment on that! I mean, yes, I know how to write. I know how to put together sentences, and I know the general structure and reason and ways in which a story should or shouldn't be. But writing is an art, and like with my painting, my writing is all about what I choose to Make Be. It's ALL about constant judgment calls on what I want or don't want in a story or on a page. And the very same judgment that makes me a good writer is the one that made me feel like an awful judge about the relative merit of people's work. Because when I choose, I choose what I want, what I like, what I have a bias for or against.

I had the privilege of going to go see Jason Statham in Parker  yesterday. It was a real treat. I've been reading the Richard Stark Parker novels because of a recommendation from Carl. Richard Stark was a pen name for Donald Westlake, and got through the first three, so was completely unspoiled for the movie, which was based on the fourth book Flashfire . The movie-Parker is softer and more sympathetic than the book one, but I can see why that was so. Smart adapters. The early Stark novels went out of print pretty quickly, but the later ones, after Parker's 1990 Comeback were much more popular. There are no spoilers below, just lots of thoughts I've had along the lines of what I love most about Parker the character.