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Migraines have confined me to bed again. There's a constant ache around the base of my skull that slowly creeps up, to my temples first, where it pauses to hover, then finally up to the crown of my head, by which point it feels like someone is trying to remove my brain in ritual embalming.

Speaking of embalming, I bought a collection of horror stories at an estate sale last year called Tales of the Dead, and each section of the book focuses alternately on Voodoo (vodun, to be be correct), ghouls (both literal and figurative), and mummies. It's a very well-curated collection to be sure, including on of Arthur Conan Doyle's pre-Sherlock Holmes stories called Lot #249. The main character is so obviously a prototype for John Watson it's amazing: think Waston while still in medical school and one of his dorm-mates figures out how to bring a mummy to life, which he then uses to settle personal grudges. The ending is charmingly done, and really cinches the main character as the seed that would become Doctor John Waston.

I also read The Case of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for the first time (not in the horror collection, in a Stevenson anthology I have.) And it's amazing to see the genesis of so many horror tropes in one story: the mad scientist who destroys himself through trying to do good, the "Character knows more about what's going on than he lets on" reveal and a hint of the Lovecraftian "progress drives man insane because it reveals the universe to be uncaring."

The story itself is more a legal thriller than anything, with Doctor Jekyll providing narration after his demise through a confession he leaves before killing himself as Hyde.

As a dedicated horror fanatic, it's amazing to look into the fledgling steps into the genre as a whole and see how much it's grown and evolved-- how contact with other cultures (Asian and East Asian especially) has diversified the field. And now, as social awareness grows and comes to play a larger roll in horror narratives you end up with movies like Get Out, which, I'd be thrilled to see more of now that we're back to using horror to shed light on to societal issues.

Because that's all horror is: the reason we enjoy it is that it throws back at us our own anxieties--in the 70's and 80's horror focused on "the other" -- that thing or person who was so different from us, to fathom them was to come face to face with being directly responsible for the othering. The horror was of our own making. Look at Carrie, Juon (the Grudge) and The Ring-- all of the antagonists stem from othering, and in some cases it can be rectified but more often than not it can't-- once the damage is done, it's done.

The cold snap laid me up so bad I had the worst "Period Flare Day" (where my chronic pain gets worse because of Shark Week) episode in eight or nine months. I still haven't gotten around to advertising, or being more active with SBAnon in general, and on the whole the last few weeks have been absolutely fucking dreadful.

I really have to get out of this mentality where I think I have certain aspects of my chronic pain "in the bag" because the only certainty in this dysfunctional flesh prison is that chronic pain is totally unpredictable.

And on top of that one of my Tumblr mutuals in Australia was diagnosed with chronic pain last month, after she spent a year and a half helping me through the onset of my issues.

So that fucking happened.

And I keep thinking that like, for all that doctors are still trying to wrap their head around "the chronic pain epidemic" very few people are looking at things like environmental pollution, when so, so many doctors are finding things like heavy metal poisoning in their patients. (I almost typed "clients" because that's what living in the US does to your outlook of the medical system.)

How else are people that live everywhere in world getting heavy metal poisoning, if not from their environment? When are we going to take the impact of pollution on people's health seriously, instead of saying "Nah, it can't be. It has to be some Medical Mystery(tm) that we have to throw obscene amounts at drug companies to figure out." The answer is right under our noses, but it takes being able and willing to admit that we are the authors of our own misery to see that.

I take that back. The Western love affair with free market capitalism is the author of our despair, and it's not until we as a culture accept how abusive that love afair is that we'll finally, finally see a way out of this.

So, I may be losing my current home care nurse because she's considering moving out of state and I don't blame her. There's no opportunity here. The days when rural and suburban areas were considered good places to raise your kids are long over. Areas like the one I live in are so economically destitute and isolated, a majority of the people who live here commute at least two hours away to find work.And I'm never going to blame a single mother of two for wanting to move somewhere where she only needs to work one job as opposed to two or three. She deserves to see her kids grow up.

Where this leaves me, on the other hand is sitting through yet another parade of older white women who see home care as more of a hobby than a job, and who have so litttle understanding of chronic illness that they go back to the office and tell the head nurse on duty that "I don't look like I need home care."

Which speaks to a deeper bias in the medical and mental health community. How someone with chronic illness presents themselves on a day to day basis as nothing to do with what their medical or psychological needs are. Allow me to repeat that so it sinks in: how a person with chronic illness presents themselves on a day to day basis has nothing to do with what their medical or psychological needs are.

Just because I greet you pleasantly at the door does not mean that I am not in terrible pain. It just means I am in a good mood in spite of the pain. Just because I'm not bed-bound that day doesn't mean I won't be the next. Complex chronic pain disorders cannot be judged by one day of observing me. As an example, here are the main reasons I need home care:

I'm a fall risk. Even with the blood pressure meds I'm on I get dangerously dizzy several times a day.

My natural appetite is so low I can and will forget to eat for an entire day, which triggers an electrolyte imbalance, which can put me in the ER for fluids.

I will forget to take my meds. Even on a good day. They call it Fibro Fog for a reason.

I cannot drive, and driving is exceedingly painful for my father, so I don't like relying on him to take me places.

Those are just the main three reasons, and don't cover the crippling migraines that can last for days, the depression that makes it impossible to eat, contributing to my already abysmal appetite, and the need for face to face social interaction that I can't get otherwise because all my friends have very demanding jobs.

Home care is so much more than just assisting the elderly and infirm. Young people need it too and their needs present so much differently, and at least with the office that most of my aids hail from there is very little understanding of that.

Friday was the first re-uniting of the old Bernie Sanders group from 2016, and while a migraine prevented me from staying for the entire meeting, a lot of the old problems from the 2016 group remained, and I hope that going forward we can correct those mistakes before we start repeating them enmasse.

The good: All the really crazy (and I mean batshit fucking loco) members of the 2016 group are gone. Mostly down the q/anon rabbit hole on reddit--and good goddamn riddance.

The bad: There isn't a single POC in the entire group, and as far as I know, no one has tried to reach out to the local BLM chapter. That was the biggest mistake from 2016 in our group specifically-- it was a bunch of older white people who were very awkward addressing POC, and that alienated a lot of potential support from neighboring groups-- it prevented us from pooling resources and really making a big statement in an area as racist and backwards as this one.

Goals for the next meeting: Broach the subject of contacting the local BLM chapter, get that line of communication up and running ASAP. ("Local" might be a few counties away but fuck it, it's something. I refuse to let the same mistakes plagued us then, haunt us now.)

Current Mood: determined

My day in a nutshell:

Get 0 sleep

Force body to function via a combination of oatmeal, caffeine and marijuana

Magically un-glitch the Sciviner replacement program I've been using on the Pi.

Spend rest of day transferring all 70k of Pathfinder AU *back into* said program.

Write another 2k just because I'm a masochist

Put on Pandora while writing

Get absurdly emotional because the songs and the writing keep lining up in the most heartbreaking ways imaginable.

Give up writing because at that point I'm literally cry-typing.

Realize that a near-death of a character will always be harder, emotionally than a straight up death scene because the moment that terrible, desperate hope is rewarded is the moment the characters are allowed to break down and lose their shit at the *potential* of loss. Potential can be so much worse than the reality of the situation because potential loss makes us confront what we are losing as we are losing it, where as real lose is like ripping off a bandaid. The sting fades. Not to with the near loss and the near misses. Those stay with you, and hopefully the audience.

How was everybody else's day?

Back on a good writing clip in Pathfinder. Re-watched a bunch of episodes that allowed me to end Hank's arc and poke at Diana's. Hank's character continues to deepen and fascinate me because there are two types of Lawful Good characters: there's the Two Dimensional Goody Two Shoes, and the Repressed Rage I Am Using To Enforce Order On An Orderless World, and Hank is obviously option two. And I feel like that's a distinction that is really easy for people that have played Tabletop RPGs to make, and harder for a lot of people who haven't-- because when alignment is enforced, when it can't be changed arbitrarily, it becomes a much more dynamic, integral part of how you play or write that character. The question is no longer about doing the right thing because it's the right thing. It becomes something the character must do for the Universe to make sense. And that catapults them from two dimensional to three.

Spent Christmas Eve with my brother and sister in law, and between all the incredible food and general merriment, I ended up having a long conversation with my sister in law during which she admitted that if she had never met me, or be put in a position to get to know me so well, she never would have realized how rigged the system in this country is against the permanently disabled, and how we a forced to skirt that system in order to have any quality of life whatsoever.

Also something I missed during the wedding was the DJ absolutely panicking when she told him to kill the strobe because I'm epileptic. She noted that the way he reacted implied that was likely the first time he had ever had to do that. Which got us onto the topic of strobe effects in movies and how she never really paid enough attention to that. She spent time after we parted for the evening looking at Does The Dog Die? Just to see their list of movies with dangerous strobe effects.

This is why I gush about my sister in law so much. I have never met anyone as willing to educate herself about disability and disability issues. As much as it has destroyed what iota of faith she had left in how this country is run, she's insisted on learning and understanding the challenges I, and everyone like me has faced. Going into the new year I am truly lucky to have gained the sister that I have. Words really do fail after a point when you have someone in your life willing to show that much solidarity.

2018 was a shitty year for so many reasons, but I'll never be able to completely hate it, because it brought me something so incredibly special. I💕 you Ash.

I would love to start actively advertising SlowBurnAnonymous but I'm at a bit of a loss as to where to start. Does anyone know a good comm for getting word of it out there?

Worked on the prologue to Heroes and Time Travelers this morning and it opens with Jennifer breaking up with Marty, which, I feel is justified not only for how their relationship is headed in the comic but also how I tend to interpret Jennifer as a character with her own agency.

The thing is, it's been clear to me for a long time that Jen is happy on the slow path. As she tells Marty in the Heroes and Time Travelers: the world is enough for her. She doesn't need to go galavanting off in time to appreciate life the way Marty and Doc do. She's capable of living in the here and now, which is something Marty genuinely has trouble doing.

If she's going to have agency, the first thing that needs to happen is for her to have her own desires and motivations outside of being with Marty. She has to want things that have nothing to do with him, and to that extent I've felt like that would mean distancing herself romantically from him. She will always have his back in 1986. If he needs her help on an adventure she'll be there, because she's still his friend and biggest fan. She wants him to succeed and be happy even if it means not being together. The Leona Lewis song "I Got You" is what comes to mind when I think about their platonic relationship in 1986:

A place to crash/ I got you/ no need to ask/ I got you/...what's weird about it/is we're right at the end/ not mad about it/ just figured it out in my head/ I'm proud to say/ I got you

It just means a lot to me that there are no hard feelings, that going their own ways doesn't mean they'll abandon one another when the chips are down.

(I will admit, I'm biased. I've been lucky to have very few ugly break-ups, and I try not to project but, come on, can you imagine these two being angry at each other for more than 72 hours? I thought not.)

In a totally unrelated topic, I promised to re-post/expand on a Detroit Become Human meta I started on my Tumblr, about the role of compassion in self awareness/deviancy.

It makes sense, as AI become more and more of a reality that their first real field tests be in the medical profession. Japan is already field testing robotic AI in nursing and senior care homes due to the fact that the medical field experiences the most burn-out and job turnover. Medicine is an overworked, underpaid and understaffed profession already. Imagine what it will be like by the time DBH becomes a reality.

The one thing we have failed to do so far is to instill even a false sense of compassion or bedside manner in an AI, but what happens when we do? It's naive to expect that instilling an AI with a sense of compassion won't one day lead to those feelings "becoming real." We cannot program AI for compassionate care and then be shocked when this leads to self awareness because the root of compassion is and of itself, awareness of things beyond the self. And for things to exist beyond the self, awareness of the self must already be present.

I've read all the game lore about Markus being a new prototype specifically created to match Carl, but all three of the playable characters have a pre-established sense of care: Kara is Alice's caretaker, Markus is Carl's and Connor is created to protect humans (a form of care) from deviant androids.

Markus doesn't want to harm humans because he was built to care for one. Unless the player chooses him to, he won't: pacifism is written all over his narrative. If you proceed in a way that feels the most natural for who Markus was before he went deviant, it feels genuinely out of character for him to be violent unless there is literally no other choice. Kara is presented with many of the same choices but Alice being a factor makes her route more nuanced if you look at her path decision-to-decision. The same with Connor. It always struck me as ironic that the character whose actions have the most influence over the narrative as a whole has the least nuanced decisions, especially if you follow the pacifist path. (Almost like saying pacifism is more natural to the human condition than violence. How zen.)

Before Detroit Become Human becomes the future, we need to learn from the philosophical questions it posits: if we create AI to work in a field that requires compassion we cannot react with fear when that compassion leads directly to self awareness. If compassion is a "deviant" behavior then we must face the reality that as a race we have accepted violence and conflict as the norm.

Lord help me I'm back on my BttF bullshit.

I re-read the Who Is Marty Mcfly arc of the comic and I hold to my belief that it was too short for it's own good and the parallels between Irving and Citizen Brown don't hold up as well as they could because Citizen Brown was a man who had been emotionally abused and mentally warped since he was seventeen years old and Irving was just a raging ego-maniac who took his failure out on Doc by deciding to go after Marty, gaslight him and emotionally manipulate him in order to gain access to the flux capacitor as well as Marty's undying loyalty and affection. The implications of that arc and Irving as a character were not plumbed nearly as deeply as they should have been, especially it's effect on Marty's psyche. He was effectively stalked and manipulated for weeks, and it will always feel out of character for Doc to "keep Irving around" especially when the beginning of the next arc proves that Irving has learned nothing and should never be granted access to Marty, like, ever.

It's understandable that Citizen Brown became who he did under Edna's influence, but Irving had no such excuse; he was just like that. And despite external similarities the two are nothing alike, Irving is far worse and more dangerous and it will never sit right with me that the comic treats them as equally worthy of redemption.

Current Mood: thoughtful

I'm going to be using this journal primarily as a way to motivate myself to write, but since 90% of my projects are crossover AUs/canon fusions, I figured I'd give you guys a rundown so you're not totally lost, and maybe drum up some interest in these fics. In order from most complete to least complete:
( Read more... )

There are a few more but those are the main three that have eaten my life in the last two years.

slowburnanonymous is up and running! I will do my best to post a few things a week. The group is moderated so I have to approve you if you want to join, and I promise to be as prompt about that as possible. I really want to make this an active, thriving comm, so please spread word to other writers if you can!

Current Mood: content

After joking with the horribly enabling

hjbender , it's entered my mind to create a writing comm for slow-burn fic writers where we can post sections, ask for advice from other writers or look for betas. If this sounds appealing, let me know, and depending on interest, I'll consider making and moderating the comm.

Re-watching Tiger and Bunny, and I know Nathan as a character ruffled a lot of feathers in the LGBTQ community because at first glance he's this horrid stereotype of a queer man, but most of that idea came from looking at him through a Western queer gaze, not an Eastern one. LGBT culture in Japan is informed by a very long, complex history of what you do behind closed doors being your business and no one else's, so the idea of being visible and open is still being figured out, the same way we had to figure it out here.

Either way, Nathan has always been one of my stand out favorite characters because his backstory is so beautifully told (mostly in the OVA) where he knew from a young age that if he wanted to be who he was, and be visible about it, he'd have to sponsor himself as a hero because "selling" a black, gay, non-binary hero would be challenging even for a corporation who was sympathetic to him and his perceived place in society--marginalized because of his race, sexuality and gender presentation on top of being a NEXT.

So he did the only thing he could, and worked his ass off to market himself, hamming up all the "flaming" jokes he could because that flamboyancy was part of his personal brand, and excuse me for being a raging progressive but it's so important to me that Nathan stands as not just a hero in his own right, but as a representative of people like him--the hyper-marginalized members of society, the ones who need a voice the most.

And goddamn if the creators didn't do their research, and give the audience a character who was the voice that community deserved.

Current Mood: drained

This is a partial re-post and continuation of a meta I started back on my Tumblr about Ronin Warriors/ YST and how despite being a shounen/ sentai series, aimed primarily at 8-13 year old boys, the point of view character is a seventeen year old girl. Nasutei was unique in her place as a female main character, who in the beginning gets typical 80's token female treatment, but also grows out of that as the series goes on.

The narrative decision to give her the amount of agency she had (acting as Ryo's guide and quasi-mentor in the beginning, bringing him to her grandfather, not staying behind when Seiji tells her to) was a gamble, because there were a lot of ways in which that could have fallen flat with the target audience of young boys. Having a "cool" female character, willing and capable of holding her own after a point really set the show apart, especially the decision to not give her a love interest (unless you feel like reading into her time with Shuten and why he ends up giving her the jewel of life in the end. Personally, I've always believed it was more mutual respect than love, and I never shipped her and Seiji. He was just too proper, and again, it was a relationship of respect after she proved she was willing to risk as much as he was in tbe Fight For Good.)

In so many ways, having the point of view character for a Shounen series be a teenage girl was a bit of a smack in the face to most other series with male heavy casts, where the token female character existed to be this soft, genteel counterpoint to the male main characters, someone who was to be treasured and protected, and rarely got their hands dirty.

Nasutei was none of this. The narrative couldn't let her occupy that role for long if her presence in the story was really going to mean anything. So the creators made her smart, brave, even recklessly so at some points (going out to distract Anubis when they were trying to revive Shuu might have been necessary, but it was still insanely dangerous. Arago already marked her as a target all the way back in episode two. He wanted her dead because he never expected anyone to know anything about the Youjakai or his plans, or the armor.)

So it's not like she expected Anubis to spare her, and she gets waterboarded in a waterfall for her trouble and almost frozen to death.

And you can't convince me that Kaos wasn't watching this go down, judging how she handled the situation, in an attempt to see just how far she was willing to go to see Good triumph.

None of this was typical or expected from a female character in a shounen narrative--token female characters were never meant to be shown to suffer, hurt, strive and fight as hard as their male counterparts--but Nasutei did, and it was part of what made the show as special as it was. Nasutei feels more like a Ghibli protagonist than a shounen protagonist, and you have to wonder how that decision was eventually made. Was it a question of wanting to reach across the gender gap and give female viewers a relatable character or was it just a function of how the main story was going to play out? Personally, I feel like if you watch the series start to finish, you can see how much the creators and writers adored Nasutei as a protagonist--how much attention they pay to her in the second season and how she continues to be herself through the OVAs. We see a young girl become a genuinely strong, brave, beautiful young woman.

Current Mood: content

Welcome to Raesoflight, formerly Raeseddon on Tumblr-- this blog will mostly be a collection of thoughts on life, fandom, writing, and my never-ending struggle to write something, anything, to completion. If you're here from Tumblr, you know what to expect: I fandom-hop like a motherfucker and am currently hovering in the nebulous space between Tiger and Bunny, Back to the Future, Ronin Warriors and Real Life.

Ask me about my AUs. Go ahead. I dare you.

I'm almost through the first season of Daredevil, right as Netflix decided to cancel it, but to be honest, the idea of having a finite amount of show left is comforting, as I can only dedicate my spoons to so much content at a time, which is a huge part of why I chose Dreamwidth as a fallback to begin with. Also, I want to get back into RPing, and Pillowfort was too much like Tumblr to really make that a comfortable transition.

I have a chronic pain disorder that gets in the way of everything, but I'm learning my way around this new state of being, learning to treat myself gently, to be forgiving of myself, and to not push myself as hard as I used to. It's a fuck of a learning curve, but I'm getting there.

I was never exactly for looking on the bright side of things, but it's better than the alternative.

How many people can say they can wake up, do what they love, fall asleep (or while away the night with their foreign fandom buddies), wake up and do it all over again.

I have a feeling this will be mostly a writing blog and repository, but we'll see.