blackjackrocket, posts by tag: inner blackjack - LiveJournal

So I'm back. I never even planned to go anywhere but for some reason I just...didn't log into this account for a month.

Which is a bit strange, considering that I haven't even been using my RP account. I'm still in SBG, but I sort of wrote Cyrus out for a while until a plot got mostway written.

Which leads me to be...well, frankly, upset. So many people wanted to be a part of the event I'd come up with, but so few of them posted. I even had to make a different post for the climax of the plot because I have to get him back in the game (mod approved action, I might add).

But it's disappointing. For the longest time I've felt like I really belong with them, and now suddenly it's like no one wants to hang out with me. I know it's "pretendy funtimes" but this isn't about the game. This is about the people. When you tell someone that you'll do something with them and then you don't show up for it, of course it's going to shake their faith in you.

Yeah, I know some of you read this journal. But I've said all this before. It's really frustrated. I divided up the thread like that in order to cut down on confusion, and yet all I hear is "it's confusing to have it divided up". I don't want things to end up being contradictory or anything, which is why I did that. I explained it.

I'm really not sure what to do. I want to keep playing Cyrus, and I want to keep playing him in SBG. But right now I'm not feeling any spark to play him, and it's because I've spent the past month sitting around waiting for comments that never came, for plots that were discussed and planned but never happened.

And I'm tired of being dismissed when I bring it up. I want to do this because I want to keep playing, but I feel like I'm being ignored.

I really do love you guys though. I'm just frustrated.


I've also been sick for quite a while. I'm not sure why, and it keeps changing around. Most of the time I'm extremely lethargic and feel borderline feverish, even though no fever has manifested. Right now I also have a sore throat. Oh yeah, and despite the lethargy, I can barely get to sleep. I'm up all night and can only sleep when I'm absolutely exhausted. Right now it's 4 am and I'm wide awake.


I've been so confused by a lot of things lately, moreso than usual. If I started a community for people to ask potentially offensive questions out of genuine answer-seeking in an environment that would be flame and accusation free, would any of you join? So often I'm met with "well you just don't WANT to understand" when people claim to be explaining things to me that I don't get despite me trying my damndest to comprehend that I take to be arbitrary standards or whatever.


So a few weeks ago I casually mentioned being asexual to my mom and she insists that I can't be because I've had crushes on guys. That's one of those things that I have a feeling makes sense to other people, but to me her reply was a massive nonsequetior. Like yeah I know those things often overlap, but to connect them so directly seems like she suddenly started babbling or something.


I'm not sure why my understanding is getting worse. It's troublesome for me, because I can't imagine a time in my life where these things *would* have made any more sense, but I was never this confused by everyday things before. It seems I can't go a few hours without thinking "well why in the world would someone do that?" or "well, that makes no logical sense" or "oh come on people don't really do that". I never used to do that.


I started on Obsession 24 but I only wrote a few paragraphs before stopping. I tell myself it's because I don't know what to do with Veronica and her whole thing (see chapter 23 to know what I'm talking about), but I don't think that's the full issue. One, I have no idea what the chapter will be *about*, but mostly, I just don't feel it any more. I haven't felt Jiri-like in ages, although I adore talking about him! It's his mindset, that complete detachment from everything around him. I feel like I'm too involved in what's around me, which is interesting because it isn't true at all. I'm going to finish the story! It may just take longer than anticipated.


It's after 5 am now and I'm only starting to get sleepy. At the beginning I was wondering if I was even going to post this, but I think I will (well, you already knew that since you read this far).

Man how can I type so fast when I'm tired and it's 5 am?


Anyway, I wanted to get some things off my chest. Any advice for getting back into Jirarudan's mindset? I'd try RPing him but it's hard to do without delving into headcanon sooner or later.

Recently it's come to my attention that I seem to have a vastly different system of importance than others seem to. People think it strange that I place so much importance on justice to the point where I'd be willing to endanger myself for it. Yet to me it's only natural. Others talk about "oh well what about your family?" and I think "wow. People would rather live in injustice and never stand up for what they believe in, thus teaching their family to do the same and thus continue the whole process, rather than put themselves at risk for what's right?"

It seems so alien to me that people would choose personal safety over a greater sociatal good. And it also seems alien to me that really the only major form we have of a greater cause over personal safety is armed forces. Which, of course, isn't really for a greater sociatal good anyway, as it takes people away from the everyday life and trains them to kill whoever the government tells them to. Which is pretty much the opposite of what I'm talking about. How odd then that armed services are considered normal, even admirable, while putting yourself at risk over things like social status or discrimination are considered risks not worth taking. Seems to me the priorities are all screwed up.

I remember I talked a while ago about how I don't feel a part of any culture, and someone said that white people tend to feel that way. But the closest cultures I regularly see are Italian and French--both usually white. The whole concept of a culture makes no sense to me. It's common traits, behaviors, clothing, and foods linked together by physical proximity and whatever happens to be around. That doesn't sound like anything all that important to me. That sounds like trying to find meaning in coincidence. These people happened to live in this spot for a while so they developed these things. What meaning does that have? Doesn't sound like anything to me. Why try to cling to it? Why try to keep people from partaking of your coincidence just because they had a different coincidence? We hear that "othering" is bad, but to say "you can take from any culture but ours" is just self-othering. And it confuses even the vague and unspecified concept of "culture" with the somewhat more solid but still vague concept of "race", because apparently I as a white person can take from any European culture, even those I don't belong to. How is me taking from, say, Irish or Finnish any different than me taking from, say, Indian or Japanese or Egyptian? I don't belong to any of those cultures, but it seems so arbitrary that I can take from those if I happen to bear a vague physical resemblance to the majority in them.

Like, ethnically I'm Russian, Romanian, and French. Personally I'm American, specifically Midwesterner. But I don't feel like any of them. I have no connection to Russia, Romania, or France, and I feel the same living on the west coast than I did in Indiana. Which is interesting because I tend to skew extremely liberal, which is what Portland tends towards, but Indiana is incredibly conservative. That ought to indicate different cultures, right? So why do things feel the same to me here as there? Is it because I see through people's rhetoric and just see the same misanthropic world I always have?

And if the issue of taking from other cultures is based on "you can't take from any your cultures have historically oppressed", then I shouldn't be able to take from...well, pretty much anybody in the area surrounding Russia, since they oppressed a LOT of their neighbors. Polish would be right out, as would anything in Scandinavia...and let's not forget internal oppression, in which case all three of those would eliminate themselves and I'd be left with nothing. Heck, if you want to really cut this to the line, I wouldn't even be able to take from American culture because of the Cold War (despite my ancestors having lived in the US for about fifty years before that even started).

I had a runin with the same loon who called me racist before. Now she's calling me sexist because I said that men have a right to feminist safe spaces. Does she think that men can't be feminists? Because that's pretty sexist right there. She's accusing me of "whataboutthemenz" thinking, with a bizarre ability to pull things I never said nor implied out of thin air and disregard anything I *do* say. Frankly, every victim of anything should be able to speak up, and if they feel oppressed and need a safe space to do it in, they should be able to go to any safe space and do so. Man, she would have HATED the womens' resource center at my college, since they had several male employees. Apparently they had no right to be there and they should stay away from anything female! Who knew! (edit later: now she's actually using her disability as a cover! I didn't think people actually DID that! She's insulting me for how DARE I use "idiot" about a disabled person! Despite there being no way for me to know this! Apparently this is some terrible thing despite us having one of the SAME DISABILITIES.)

But that brings me to another topic. Gender feels so incredibly alien to me as well. Hormones don't dictate who we are, do they? Is that really that commonplace that a happenstance of birth will define you? That seems irregular, like it ought to be incredibly uncommon, almost unheard of. And yet almost everybody is. Why? I don't feel like a female. But I know I wouldn't feel like a male either. My body is just there to carry my mind around. It's secondary. It's not who I as a person, as a thinking being, am. It's just a body. Why is that so important? Why is that above experience and deed? Aren't those the true definitions of what makes a person? Why are those considered so remote, away from the primary form? It's just a form. A framework. Something unimportant. To link action to it, to link likes to it, to link personality to it...why? Why connect such distant and unrelated points? Why establish standards based on body? Why divide society into bodies? Bodies aren't people. They're sacks of meat and bone.

I mean sure, from a scientific standpoint, brains are just sacks of neurons, but the brain is the real self. It's where our experiences and personalities are stored. It's where WE are stored. And to base things on the body before the personality even begins to develop is just strange. Just useless, just self-defeating, just divisive.

I've always loved the idea of androgyny, and at first I thought that was just because I grew up in the 1980s, but it goes beyond fashion or music stars. It just makes SENSE, because we *aren't* our bodies, and to define identity on them is such a bizarre concept.

I seem to have moved a long way from my starting point. But I guess it all boils down to "the world sucks and their arbitrary rules are stupid".

Plus I have a meme to post.

The con was fun but...

I donno. I feel so sad lately that even that couldn't shake it out of me.

These BW rumors have my stomach in knots because I just KNOW that I'm going to wind up getting attached to someone in it (no idea who yet, just a general thought). And the last DP episode...well, it was disappointing. I wanted closure on TG and I know I'm not the only one (others have spoken to me about the subject). We want to know what happened to Cyrus. We want to know about his new universe. Also we want to know where the hell Charon ran off to, because that had to have a purpose.

But hey, first new Rocket since early Hoenn! Not counting Christopher, since he's technically an ex-Rocket, the last one we got was the undercover burger girl who gave B&C their assignment on the bottom of a box of fries.

I don't want to do anything lately but lie in bed and think about characters. I want a hug, and more often than not I also want to hug them. I know they don't exist, but that makes it even more difficult.

Why is this happening now? Aren't I supposed to be over this? Aren't my fixations supposed to manifest differently now that I've been out of puberty for ten years? I thought the freaky emotional stuff I had as a teenager was because of hormone levels wildly fluxuating or something. But instead they just keep going.

And it bothers me to the point where I feel like crying constantly. I want them to be ok, but I can't influence it at all. Writing fics is just fantasy. I want the people who write the canons to give these people a good end. That's why I love DPA, or one of the reasons. Hareta does what the player character *should* do and tries to reason with Cyrus. And we know that Hareta can feel hatred, because he hates Charon, and for good reason (I think Cyrus misinterpreted things when he said that Hareta was "without a shadow of anger" because Hareta was still pretty mad at him even in that scene. He just didn't *hate* him).

How much of this is self-reflection? I saw a fandom secret a while back where someone said that it bothered them when people said that Azula from ATLA would never get better because they saw a lot of themself in her and wanted there to be hope for them too. And I feel the same way about Cyrus. I want things to be better for him (they'll never really be "ok", but Ihara showed that he can find happiness in the world) because I see so much of me in him. But I also want things to be better for him aside from that, just as a matter of principle. That part goes with my idea that the reason the team was still around at the end of the game was because the game makers wanted us to realize that, while Cyrus himself took it too far, he had a valid point that could be salvaged if rid of its extremism. And really, he did. He was right about a lot of things, but took it to the point where even people who agreed with his line of thought (ie, the players) not only had to stop him, but wanted to stop him. And I did, and I still do. But I want to stop him from running away, too. I want to stop him from banishing himself, even if the only thing keeping him away is his own stubbornness.

...I'm not sure how much of that is the reflection factor. Some things aren't at all. I think my sympathy towards him comes from a variety of influences, really.

Jiri...Jiri is interesting. Again there's a lot of me in there, again there's the dichotomy of both wanting his downfall and wanting to pick up the pieces, again there's a lot of things that are entirely divorced from myself. But I should be able to see his thought process clearer, shouldn't I? Especially since I'm convinced that he's also autistic (interestingly, some people think Cyrus is, but I don't see it at all in him. Jiri on the other hand is practically textbook). I know that's not exactly a cut-and-dry thing, but it should be closer, right? Just a bit?

But Jiri is also sort of lost. I'm still not convinced that he learned anything at the end, or even understood why he just lost everything. And the absence of a connection to his loss is strange, unless he just doesn't show it (count his facial expressions in the film. He has about four visible moods the entire time).

...The weather influences my mood a lot. Not even that really, but the temperature. When it gets colder, I get really fucked up, no matter the actual weather. I look ahead to the end of the year and I think of it as a barren wasteland. That's my visual representation of fall--a hollow time with mindless actions.

I used to love Halloween. I'd prepare all October for it. But now it's just "pop on a costume for an hour or so and hand out candy" without any real action. I hardly even decorate any more, and I never go anywhere.

Thanksgiving is boring and always has been. The same food, the same people, the same brown room looking out over a dark yard. It's like being in a cave.

Christmas is months of planning leading to a few hours of excitement and then nothing. It's a letdown. And the shopping is tedious with the same damn songs played every single year.

I really hate this time of year. It's boring, boring, boring. So hollow.

I want to go out and do something but I can't.

Having a huge auction here! And blackjacksales had its biggest update ever!


But anyway. People tell me that it's hard to fight the world, that it's impossible to resist what society tells you.

For me, it's the opposite. It's far harder for me to surrender my will than it is to go with the flow. I can't lose myself. I think it's impossible for me to do so. And it's also impossible for me to understand how so many people can be broken by society.

I've talked in here before about how I was abused by several teachers and how it confused me how the other students never did anything. Even back then, it confused me how people could just accept someone telling them that they were inferior. I still can't fathom that thinking. Being told that my whole life just made me fight harder. I know myself. What amazes me is that so many others seem to not know themselves.

It just...baffles me. I can't understand that. I can't understand how it's apparently so much easier to just get broken. To me, that'd be like trying to lift a train.

I do try to learn, I really do. But no answer makes any sense. It seems counterproductive at best and abandoning all sense of self at worst. And if you abandon your self, then who are you?

I state my views and people accuse me of bullshitting, of trolling, of being a "priviledged asshole" (I've also spoken before on how priviledge is relative, and how being a white person or a rich person or anything like that is meaningless when you have a teacher dragging you down the hallway because you sat on your knees in your chair instead of on your butt). I talk about my experiences and get told that they don't matter. Why don't they matter? They never say.

So honestly, what gives?

So it's con time again! I'll be at ChibiChibicon in Olympia Washington this coming weekend. It's a one-day free event at Evergreen college if you all want to stop by and buy stuff from me. Buy stuff? That's right, I'm taking blackjacksales on the road!

Also I got in a new game! sumabura_gakuen now has a new ethics teacher.



Speaking of ethics and teachers (and here's where the entry gets serious and not in the way it's been), how is this "derailing"? I saw a post that was about abuse, didn't specify any kind, and for reasons that I still don't understand, said not to talk about white men. Even though neither of those traits were even remotely relevant for the sort of abuse I and my classmates went through. So I brought that up and got screamed at for derailing, for (somehow even though I never said such a thing) saying that white male privildge didn't exist, for being irrelevent, for talking about "outliers"--yes, apparently, classroom abuse doesn't matter. And I got banned from the journal.

Disgusting. We're never going to have everyone on equal ground until we start PUTTING them there, and that means seeing things as they are without unnecessary trappings. And in the cases of both me and my sister, and every classmate I cite in my summary, neither race nor gender mattered to our abusers. Yes these things matter in the world (although for the life of me I can't figure out WHY or HOW, but I know that they matter to people in general). But they're not the only reason everything ever happens. Even if some things under an umbrella happen for these reasons, other things under the umbrella may have nothing whatsoever to do with them. And that's what happened here. And I got told that I'm apparently a statisticial glitch. Classrooms after classrooms of 30+ kids, all statistical glitches.

Right.

And of course she closes it off with a flippant reference to something that not only happened four and a half years ago but also that got taken wildly out of context (when I said "outwalk a hurricane" I also said WITH A WEEK'S NOTICE, which never gets repeated).

God, people are fucking idiots today. Earlier I had to infract someone for trolling the blogs, and she reported me for harassment. At least the other mods have the good sense to recognize that she's an asswipe.

Oh here we go, edit time--one of the twerps from that thread replied talking about the leading forms of abuse. One of the ones she listed was child abuse. And then she screamed at me again for derailing...even though by her own definitions I was ON TOPIC. Unless she's using some new definition of "child abuse" that says it can't be done by teachers.

Prereserved Soul Silver yesterday. Yaaaay. Oh yeah, and got the shiny Pichu on Pearl and Platinum.

I haven't played Platinum since November, according to the in-game journal, and I know why. Not just the character alterations, but also that I'd just be too sad to play it.

That's why I wish people would stop asking me to watch the finale dub with them. I don't think they understand how very badly that episode affected me. It's been almost three months and I'm still overcome to the point of sobbing over it. I can't watch it again, period.

See, when I become emotionally attached to a character, I start feeling what they do. And when there's a character who's so consumed with negative emotions that he'd rather leave the world than exist in it, I feel that despair. Finding out his backstory was terrible enough, but seeing that happen...

So please stop asking me to watch with you. I know some of you want to make fun of it as a coping mechanism, because I know some of you were affected pretty deeply too. But I honestly cannot join you. I don't want to be miserable any longer than one viewing would do.

I'll need to know some things, like how they handle J (although given that 4Kids was fine with blowing up Fuji and he almost certainly died, J with her relatively high odds of survival, albiet unspoken, will probably get past just fine), and what Cyrus's animeverse motives were, as well as some dialogue, but these are things I cannot get on my own. I really hope you guys understand.


I wish I didn't feel these things. I wish I could just watch things and not take on the emotions of the characters. But it's been like this for a while (I haven't been able to watch the last part of the second movie in YEARS) and it's only getting worse.

I wonder if this isn't some form of introspection for me. For a long time I suspected that the reason Cyrus cut off his emotions was because it was the only way he could control them and that his natural emotions were stronger than most others, and then two doctors tell me that MY natural emotions are stronger than most people. I laughed at the time because it was so similar to my theory, but then it hit me that maybe I get attached to these characters because of some subconcious realization that I have these things in common with them.

Heck, when timecircuits was going, or rather when I first apped for it, I asked the mod if fanon was ok and she said no, but she heard me out when I said that I could back it up with canon. When she heard that theory, she said she thought that *was* canon. And it seems everyone I run it past seems to say either that they thought so already or that it makes perfect sense, so I know it's not just me babbling. One person that I started talking to only recently said she was glad to find another person who thought so as well, so she'd developed that theory independently of me.

...I always feel like I have to overly prove these theories of mine because I'm considered an influentional member of fandom, and I honestly feel validated when people come to the same conclusions I do. Sometimes being a fan of note (I don't want to say "big name fan" because people will always jump on anyone who calls themselves that, even if they're going off what other people have called them) really really sucks.

I doubt myself constantly. It really hurts.

I'm here! Been occupied with Ocarina of Time--holy COW it's taking me a long time to get through. I have to have a walkthrough almost all the time. Gyah, mentioned that on Bulbagarden and people were all "Seriously?" and "You're kidding, right?" Hey, not my fault that I can't see shit in that game. Not only is it almost pitch-dark in most of the dungeons, but the camera has a nasty tendency to swing around. Not to mention that they didn't update the text in the Wii version for the Classic Controller and still gives the N64 specs, so I was pounding the Z button like it told me only to discover that on the CC it's the L button instead.

Anyway, next week I'll be getting a reserve on either HG or SS, but I can't decide which one yet. And so I turn to you!

HG Pros and Cons
+Fewer people getting it
-Already played Gold

SS Pros and Cons
+LUGIA
-More people getting it

YOU DECIDE.


Oh yeah, speaking of "you decide", the Serebii board is having its yearly fanfic contest. In case any of you keep up with fics over there, the ones I've done that're elegible for it are Obsession, Creation, Location, and Red.


And speaking of fanfics, man, do you guys read metafandom? All this stuff about politics of fics and fandoms and what it means when we have characters do x...sometimes I feel like I'm the only person who writes what the characters would do and not just what I want them to do or what I feel would be in the best political interest to have them do. Hell, whenever I try to write as me rather than as them, the fics don't get done. The characters don't *let* me. Metaphorically speaking of course, but you know what I mean.

But all this stuff about, say, the politics of slash and if it's inherently demeaning or exploitative or anything...what the hell. Doesn't that depend on the individual fic? You really can't deem a genre with such a debate.

Maybe this is because I see things as just that--a collection of individuals. I always have. I look at "the media"--what "media", there's invidual shows, individual movies made by individual writers and directors, so on--and I don't see the pressure people talk about. People go on about the pressure "the media" puts on girls to look a certain way or act a certain way...I never felt it. Not from what I watch, not from what I read, not from anything. I saw women act that way, but I always percieve it as "here is an individual woman" rather than "here is a representation of what you should be like".

It's like when people talk about when a sports star gets busted for something how these people are supposed to be role models--how? So you can do whatever your sport requires to a ball. How is that inherently a position of role model? Where does that come in? And moreover, HOW does that come in? Because to me, there's being good at something and there's being a good person, and it's entirely possible to emulate the one without the other.

The world is a very illogical place (as you may have gleaned from my previous entries). Are we all supposed to break away from groups? If so, what defines those groups and doesn't breaking away from them simply put us in new groups?

Huh. So it's been a while, everything's happened, and I still can't think of much to say.

I'm writing Obsession 20 as I have been since November, but I have no idea if I can get it done by the end of the year.

Since the finale I've been shaky and overall worse. But it can't all be related to that, because that wouldn't make my back and legs hurt. It wouldn't make me stop moving in the middle of the grocery store. It wouldn't make me veer off when I try to walk in a straight line.

That last one is why I can't go anywhere. The train station is a half-mile away but I can't walk to it because I can't take the risk that my legs won't take me into the road. It's happened before and I'm just glad that there weren't any cars around then.

But emotionally, it seems the finale was the tipping point. ( More character ramblingsCollapse )

( Blathering about my identityCollapse )

Perhaps this is "derailing" my own post. Also what the hell LJ. I'm trying to write a rather long post here--stop moving the text box all over the place. I need to have the part I'm writing on the screen at all times and you keep moving the viewable part upwards. I really fucking hate you.

So does anyone else think that I'm going insane? Or was I already there? I seem to have lost my filters. Maybe I had one anon troll too many or something and I decided who the fuck cares, I'll say what I want to say if they're going to troll me anyway.

Speaking of which, 76.208.28.217? Was there any necessary reason to reply to my request for postcards with "what is this I don't even"? Clearly you have no friends if you don't know a holiday mailing when you see it. At least I have better things to do with my time.

And speaking of "better things to do", I think I need to be cheered up. I've been pretty miserable lately, so here, tell me some good things about me.

THE FANFICTION LOVE MEME

...I don't know what to say.

I really don't...


I've been sick for over a month. I've been feverish, shaky, coughing hoarsely, dazed, itchy...I can't seem to focus on anything for very long at all...

I've been trying to write Obsession. I started the 20th chapter, but so far it's very slow going. I've gotten maybe a page and a half done, and that's in varying parts no less. Usually I write straight through, but I can't focus for that long so I have to write in spurts and pray like crazy I can link them together somehow.

Breaking my focus even more...goddammit. Why do I have to get attached to these characters? It never ends well. ( spoilers and stuff you're probably better off not knowing about meCollapse )



I hope I feel better soon. In any regard.

I don't know what it is about this time of year. Something always happens to make me miserable. Last year it was Maddie dying and I never truly got over that. But even that wasn't even the first thing. I think I've been scared to write ever since that "everything you write is the same" comment at a con last year and then doing that fic with Abby that made us so depressed that to this day we haven't edited it.

Only one of those things should have affected me, and I never even met her. Why did it hit me so hard?


...dammit.