cericonversion

New glasses! They're in. Soon's I can hook up with a ride—which is in the works as I type—I can go pick them up. Yay!

I neglected my vision needs, along with so much else, in my pre-outing years of isolation and sickness. I am now very much looking forward to seeing the world clearly again.
 

I served out my suspension without particular complaint—as I said last week, I broke a rule and know I did, and don't object to them enforcing their rules. I object a lot to this exchange in the Trouble Tickets thread about it:

Eric Brennan: "In addition, it's pretty clear that given Cericonversion's "Waah, I'm packing up my crap and leaving" post two posts above the one Dan links to, he knew exactly what he was doing when he suicided by mod. So, I'm finding it hard to fault Dan, yet again."

Ragnarok_Engine: "She, please. Cericonversion is one of our trans posters, whose genders you seem to frequently confuse."

Eric Brennan: "I'll happily refer to her as she now that I know, but for the record I didn't even know who Cericonversion was before this thread. If somebody wants something other than a randomly assigned gender when I talk about them, I need a clear signal."

Cessna: "We don't keep dossiers on everyone's background. There are several thousand regular Users of this board. Do not get snippy because we can't remember all of them or details about their personal lives."

Several people: How about using "they"?

Eric Brennan: "For those people suggesting I use "they," I have gotten very angry complaints from at least two trans posters who complained I was being incredibly prejudiced. So, at this point, it's nothing personal, it's just the Internet and usernames and avatars fucking with you, not me. If I could psychically get this stuff right, believe me, I would. I genuinely hate to offend unintentionally."

Me, in this post: Oh, come on. My sig file's loaded up with links to trans-related information, and gender cues. It is not hard to spot, really. It's a matter of public record that Eric and perhaps other mods are really looking for excuses to ban more of the vocal TS and TG posters, and this is just not anything I care to put up with. Building a new persona hasn't been easy or comfortable a lot of the time, and I just don't need the tension of wondering when moderator transphobia may translate into more acts of erasure and silencing.

I'll look into other places to talk about what I've been yakking about there.

Another Friday, another testosterone shot. Various things delayed it until mid-afternoon, and wow did I have a ugly midday crash. Not as bad as last week's, but not good at all. By evening I was back on track. I still don't want the stuff, but I can't at all deny the very real benefits in energy and mood.

(I strongly suspect I'd get a lot of the same relief from estrogen, but the more I read up on the risks to people with susceptibility to cancers and heart troubles, the more I can live with waiting on that some, hard as it sometimes is.)

My blood pressure continues to improve, not dramatically but pretty steadily. My weight isn't anywhere encouraging, but it's not getting any worse, and I figure that it's reasonable to wait at least a week or few more before worrying about that much, in light of all the other stuff going on.

My new glasses came in...with a lens flaw, so they're getting re-ground. Should have those by the end of this next week.

Coming up this week, dentistry. I'm expecting a mouthful of bad news; we'll see.
 

"Ceri, it's a dreary rainy day in Seattle. What do you do for fun on a February afternoon like this?"

"Why, I kill neo-Nazis with kung fu!"



I don't do male characters very often, but I thought that some of the options for them in CoH looked interesting. I've got a female version of the same general power concept elsewhere, and both are great fun.

I had a really productive exchange with a friend this morning.

I can articulate my major problem with WoW right now, and have touched on this in earlier posts, I think: stuff is either beyond a level of play I can push myself too right now, tied up in skills I lack and (sum of "don't wish to" and "cannot readily") acquire, or made too easy because I'm overgeared for them. And that seems not likely to change anytime soon.

But there's stuff I like doing along the way. Leveling up, trying old challenges in new ways, seeing nooks and crannies of the world I haven't much explored before, and so on. Somewhere I encountered the phrase "serial leveling" to describe a style of WoW play (and maybe other MMOs too, I wouldn't know), where you figure that once a character's hit the level cap and gone through as much endgame as you care for, you go start again with something else.

That may be just what I need. Gonna give it a try, I think, sometime soon.
 

I can't say I'm surprised at having netted a seven-day ban for comments in the spirit of my last post here. Does make the stepping away easier, though.
 

So it turns out that I do have a threshold of "I just don't want to put up with this", and I reached it today. Turns out the threshold is the moderators' decision that calling the teabagger conservative stooges "fascist" is a group attack, and that since RPG Net has some teabagger posters, that's not allowed.

Sorry...actually, no. Not sorry a bit for declining to treat that hodge-podge of fools and moral monsters respectfully. I can read the RPG stuff while logged out, and look around for other places to yammer about this and that.
 

Gut troubles the last couple days. Some of it's the diabetes medication, some of it the bouncing energy levels, some of it whatever. Fact is, I've got nausea, and also hemorrhoids from hell. So I get to stay close to home and pile a lot of padding on the desk chair.

Y'know, this is really not a great catastrophe. But damn if it isn't annoying.
 

#1. I cratered badly on Wednesday and Thursday, the last couple days before my next testosterone shot. With my doctor's concurrence, I'm going to try half the dosage every week for a couple of weeks, rather than full dosage every other week, and see if the cratering can be diminished or outright dodged. Today's shot went smoothly. I don't expect to ever like injecting myself but I'm glad I can do it without fuss.

#2. I've got new glasses on order! I've been without some for several years—it's one of the things I lost track of updating while in my multi-year slump—but got a current prescription a few weeks back, and had money in hand, so I went shopping. I got the best service, really amazingly attentive and informative service, at the local Lenscrafters, so I bought from them. In a week or so I'll have a set of lineless bifocals in a simple silver half-frame, and will be glad.
 

Some things came into focus for me while browsing wow.com today, and in particular looking at an article about changes to the heroic instances in 3.3.2, forthcoming sometime soon. They're simplifying encounters. For instance, the priestess in Old Kingdom who calls acolytes for sacrifice will only do it once, and the mana entity in Nexus will only spawn void rifts once. And so forth and so on.

The problem for me is that there's no real level of challenge that is both interesting and accessible to me.

Below me (with my shaman, at least), there are the heroics. The thought of running enough to keep getting the emblems of frost needed for more tier 10 is, um, not appealing. And there are raids that I'm way, way overgeared for.

"Beside" me there are more raids, some of which I'm overgeared and some of which are really more tactically involved than I'm good at. There's stuff I want to see, but I'm figuring at this point that it's going into the hopper for some future zone after Icecrown Citadel stops being current, since it's absorbing attention. (And why not? Folks who can do the new stuff should.) There are hard modes for a lot of raid encounters, and they hold little appeal to me after my experiences with them so far. There's the Argent Tournament, but I hate jousting, partly because I'm simply bad at it. I've put in more than enough hours to feel comfortable asserting this: I genuinely wasn't any better after a hundred hours of trying. And like that.

And above me there are raid challenges that I don't see myself being able to rise to meet anytime soon. It's true that I have more energy now than I did a few weeks ago. But the problems facing me weren't ones of energy, but of coordination and timing, and those things really aren't any better.

The thought of leveling up an alt isn't especially appealing right now because it would hit the same gaps. There are loremaster and other achievements, but right at the moment I'm liking the thrill of discovery with CoH/CoV storylines. (I am well aware that they'll become old hat in due season.) The remaining quests offer a kind of bad mixture of tedium and difficulty—stuff I can do but is grindy and slow, or stuff I just walk through.

I don't feel done with WoW, at all. But I have a better sense of what needs to improve in me and/or in my interactions with the game to let me keep having fresh fun with it. That's satisfying—not a solution but a sense of what a solution will feel like.
 

 Up 0.9 pounds from two weeks ago, to 307.0. But my blood pressure is very significantly improving and my energy level continues to rise. Weight will improve in its turn.

I've noticed something as my energy and mood pick up some this last week and a bit. I've got a lot of unpleasant emotion sloshing around: personal stresses, rage and helpless despair about developments in US politics, and like that. Now, I don't actually want or even really wish to give up on trying to be a decent person in the midst of awful circumstances. Nor, come to that, do I have a life which would afford me much opportunity for PROFIT!!! even if I did, to be honest.

But sometimes the load just is awfully high. And it's at this point that firing up supervillains feels really, really good. They are free to choose do to terrible things, or to follow compulsions and imperatives I'm very glad not to have, and to look glamorous or sinister or excellent while doing it. This is, as nearly as I can tell, pretty much exactly catharsis in the classical sense: gather up and unleash the negative passions in the framework of an unreal world, and discharge them. I come out of a session with one of my villains feeling better, and am able to attend to various chores I've been putting off.
 

It's been a solid month now since I signed up, and I've given more or less all the combinations of powers that most appealed to me, and I find that I have two particular sweet spots.

#1. Masterminds. I love being able to sit back and command my minions to do the heavy lifting, while doing supplemental things. I love the pet classes in World of Warcraft, and this is that kind of thing except more so. My highest-level super now is Ada Phoenix, my robots/traps mastermind, and I've got a couple others coming along. They solo great, and they do pretty well in teams, too.

#2. Stalkers. Now, I'm not going to claim I'm actually any good at them. But I truly love stealth, and always have - my roster of favorite supers has always been a bit heavy on those who can escape normal barriers to movement and understanding. I'm dabbling with various power sets to see what's most fun for me in practice.

I'll be glad when Going Rogue comes out, though. The Rogue Isles are interesting enough but sometimes more than a touch gray. Mastermind and stalker powers plus Paragon City scenery will be nice.

I'm mending. A week and a weekend off of amlodipine, and I'm clearer-headed and in significantly better mood. This isn't to say I'm free of weakness or mood drops, just that the baseline and my recovery rate are both up. I've got a nasty headache at the moment, but I'm expecting it to pass. Hoping for more good developments this week.
 

Viewers at home may remember that last fall I turned out to have catastrophically high blood pressure—212/110 in the doctor's office. So I started on amlodipine, and it turned out to be its own problem, and now I'm on hydrochlorothiazide, along with the testosterone injections and the diabetes medications I was already taking.

This morning's blood pressure, with three readings a few minutes apart:

140/100, pulse 80
156/101, pulse 83
137/101, pulse 80

Wow. This is change I like.

This is how it is: over the years I've had plenty of opportunities to watch friends play MMOs besides World of Warcraft and tried out a few myself, but I always ended up finding them too much of a drag for one reason or another. Back when it was new, several of my friends really got into City of Heroes, and I had fun watching, but at that point I didn't have a computer that could run it anyway. When City of Villains came out, I did, and I gave it a shot, and had some fun, but found it too grindy after a while. Too much the same old same old and such slow advancement. So I dropped it.

Now there's a Mac client for it and I have a great new Mac, and friends who've always wanted me to try it with them, so...I signed up again. And y'know, I'm having a lot of fun. There are things I think it really does better than WoW, and some just plain differently, and I like the change of pace. (I will have a separate post on these thoughts.) I got to the end of my trial period and signed up for a regular account.

My global handle there is @Penumbri and I'm playing on Virtue server, since that's where I have friends and also where there are some roleplaying opportunities. For me the game works in two modes: assembling as a team to vigorously beat up exotic targets more or less at random, and exploring alone or with a very few allies to actually follow storylines and learn how the world works and what's up. So I have some characters for each mode. I've also learned that while I love meleeing, I'm really too easily disoriented right now by rapid swings in viewpoint and prone to some sensory overload from too many powers' effects in close proximity and right up close on my screen. Fortunately, that still leaves me a lot of options.

• Penumbri, magic defender, dark miasma/dark blast. Yes, my most advanced character is a magical type with shadow powers. This is presumably not a surprise. She's in her mid-20s and advancing well with a very congenial roleplaying group, the Incognitus faction of Paragon Universe. She's a former rationalist, which means in a superhero universe's context that she always figured all "magic" was psionics and misunderstanding. Then she committed suicide and ran into really inhuman entities in the abyss, who've been talking to her ever since, all through her recovery and building a new life.

• Ada Phoenix, technological mastermind, robotics/traps. Yes, my next most advanced character is a robots-and-gadgets person. This is presumably also not a surprise. She's in her high 10s, hanging out some with a couple different villain groups, and being pure soloing delight most of the time. She's a likely candidate for turning neutral or even heroic when the Going Rogue expansion comes out, as crime is for her simply a more moral alternative than being a military-industrial cog.

I've also got a rotating roster of experiments. Currently active: Accendi, a magic fire/fire blaster, and That Medulla Girl, a mutant illusion/radiation controller. More masterminds are probably next.

And that's what I've been doing while on WoW hiatus. When I'm in position to pick up WoW again, I expect to continue this too.

Signing out of a bunch of the places I post, because if I try to answer a lot of comments about the state of Democratic politics and the political health of the US just right now, I will say things that will earn bans.
 

I moved my laser ablation surgery date. I'm just not ready for it on the 4th - I need to recover from this exhaustion and get back on track. And then they have some closed time for building renovations, and like that, but they can see me in mid-April. I asked if there were risks of degeneration or other complication from waiting, and they said no - my system's already stopped the major leakage, and this will be to prevent future episodes. Good to have that set.

I'm feeling ongoing ambivalence about WoW. But I don't have make any decisions about it, either. This is a medication adjustment week, and I can see how I feel next week, and so on.