Nice try, but no.

A feminist argument I've been hearing more and more often lately is that anyone, and in particular, any woman who opposes feminism should logically also oppose equal pay, suffrage, etc.
NO.
FUCK NO.
This is another spin on the same equivocational nonsense as ever. 'You can't oppose us because we have this name, because this name means this thing and if you oppose us you oppose this thing."
Having inherited a label does not mean that you stood for the same things as the previous owners. it doesn't matter what the movement calls itself. Modern feminism does not have the same views, the same goals,or even the same proponents that it did back when it made those strides.
Third-wave feminism is not first- or second-wave feminism and it has no right even calling itself the same name, let alone trying to take credit for those movements' accomplishments, and it CERTAINLY has no fucking right to demand that anyone who oppose it forego any benefits they might receive from what those movements did.
It is perfectly consist to be anti-feminist and oppose the dishonest, hypocritical, responsibility-abdicating, censorship-promoting victim-culture CULT that modern feminism has become and still have respect for what actual advocates for gender equality have accomplished and never let anyone tell you otherwise.

NOT WHAT THAT WORD MEANS.

"This is our six-month anniversary!"
Oh my fucking gods MENSIVERSARY. It's your sixth MENSIVERSARY.
The word for a monthly recurring date is a mensiversary.
Open a godsdamned dictionary or at least understand enough fifth-fucking-grade etymology to grasp that the prefix 'ann-' is derived from the latin 'annum', as in 'annual', meaning ONCE A GODSDAMNED YEAR. THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ANNIVERSARY OF ANY PERIOD OF TIME BUT A YEAR.
And I freaking GUARANTEE that if your enough of a stereotypical chick to want to celebrate monthly dates, you've seen the prefix 'mens-' SOMEWHERE and ought to have a vague grasp as to its meaning.

Marketing FAIL.

Did I seriously just receive an email offering me free online college courses...at LIBERTY UNIVERSITY?
Ahem. Folks? I feel that perhaps your marketing team all suffered SPONTANEOUS SIMULTANEOUS DEBILITATING STROKES, because you literally could NOT have missed your target demographic harder with that one.

Chainimals Sale!

For those of you who don't know, my latest pet project has been the Chainimals: a series of chainmail plush animals.

Meet Tinsel the Cat:

Turpentine the Rattlesnake:

Thistle the Rabbit:

And Trellis the Treefrog:

Pretty cool, huh? Well, I am completely broke and in desperate need of supplies, so Ravengel Ringworks is delighted to present the first ever Chainimals sale! 20$ off any Chainimals commissioned for the next month. Remember, I'll never make the same animal twice, so order now before someone else takes your favorite critter.

Price is 70$ per Chainimal, after discount. Offer good through 8/14/11. Shipping (if applicable) not included. Allow 4-6 weeks for completion. Specify animal and color (only colors that appear in nature, please; I'd rather my portfolio not look like a kindergartener's coloring book). Please note that chrome silver is the closest color available to white. Animals not available: Rabbit, wolf, cat, rattlesnake.

Discounts of up to 10$ may apply for smaller Chainimals. Contrariwise, larger-than average Chainimals, or ones that require special features (such as the rattlesnake's tail), may incur additional charges of up to 10$. Reply to this post to contact me, or email me at stellar_raven@hotmail.com to order.

Incidentally, Trellis the Treefrog is available for sale. While obviously not a new commission, I'll let him go for the sale price, since he's a bit smaller than standard.

Oh, and a tip of the hat to Kaiser and Kalen for the pics. Asante, guys.

Proximate Cause VS Free Will...

If someone holds a gun to a little girl's head and tells me he'll shoot if I take another step, and I take another step, and he shoots her, whose fault is it that the girl is dead?

It absolutely APPALLS me how many people would say that it's mine.

Folks, even if I held a gun of my own to the guy's head and DEMANDED that he pull the trigger, it would be HIS FAULT that the girl is dead because HE CHOSE TO DO IT.

You can make a case that shooting her under those circumstances was the right thing to do, but you can't make a case that it wasn't his choice to kill her. He could have chosen death. Instead he chose to kill. Me? I never shot anybody. But I'll bet his first words after he pulled the trigger would be something to the effect of, "I had no choice."

People are fond of saying that actions have consequences. Fine. I'll buy that. For every action there's a reaction. Pretty fundamental, really. A child throws a brick through a window, it'd be downright ridiculous not to expect the window to break. Action, consequence.

What I refuse to buy is the idea that anybody's actions ARE consequences. An action is someone's choice. You can't claim that someone's actions are consequences of someone else's actions and still claim to believe in choice. It's Free Will OR Proximate Cause, people. Not both.

This confused me most when I was a kid, getting trouble, and I'd get grounded, and there'd be something in the accompanying lecture about this being my own fault, and how we all have to accept the consequences of our actions.

Wait, what? Parents, this makes no sense at all. The grounding wasn't the result of the child's actions. The broken window is the result of the child's actions. Grounding the child is YOUR action. YOUR choice. You could just as easily NOT ground him. The child isn't grounding himself. You can't rattle off an entire spiel about taking responsibility for one's own actions, and then in the next sentence claim that you're not responsible for your own.

Dear aspiring Fanfiction writers of the Net:

I, Jareth Valentine, would hereby like to make the following points perfectly clear. Please pay attention.

1. The word 'chemistry' is not spelled with an 'a'. Misspelling words in the synopsis of your story is bad enough, but if you cannot spell the title right, no one will read your story. Especially if the title of your story is a third-grade spelling word.
Misspellings in titles are very rarely acceptable. If the premise of your story is that your protagonist cannot spell, is failing chemistry because of it, and winds up having a relationship with his tutor, fine. That makes it clever. Otherwise, fix it.

2. The body-switch Freaky Friday-esque walk-a-mile storyline is cliche, but arguably a classic, and if done well, or if skirting such tabboo topics such as gender reversal, CAN function as the premise of a good story. However, it does not work if the characters in question are identical twins. Identical twins could simply trade bedrooms and go about their own lives with no one the wiser, as they are IDENTICAL. Stop trying to write Olsen Twins or Zack and Cody stories using this premise.

3. Stories about the actors who portray characters of a particular show do not belong in that show's fandom. They belong in that actor's fandom. A Superman fan will probably not give a crap about Christopher Reeve. He'll want to read about Superman. Stop putting your Zac/Vanessa stories under the High School Musical category; High School Musical fans want to read Troy/Gabriella.
And yes, there IS a difference.

4. Not EVERYTHING should crossover. Seriously. Somethings just don't mix.  DeGrassi/South of Nowhere? Sure. Harry Potter/Peter Pan? Why not. Bambi/Tron? No. Use a little discretion, please.
(Gods. I just know somebody out there's going to write a Bambi/Tron story now...)

5. The people who read slash already believe that it's okay to be gay, or they wouldn't be reading slash. Stop using the characters in your slash stories as mouthpieces for your own pro-gay affirmation propaganda; you're preaching to the choir.

6. On that note, choir is spelled 'choir', not 'quire'. There's not a word processor made these days that doesn't have spell check. Please use it.

7. Stop putting up disclaimers. FF.net is a fanfiction site. Everything there, by definition, belongs to someone else. You don't need to tell us that it's not yours.

8. If you put something up in the wrong section, or rate it wrong, or if the synopsis is not an accurate representation of the story, or if you spring something controversial on your readers with no warning, do not be offended when you start to get bad reviews complaining about it. Contrariwise, if the story is right where it's supposed to be and the synopsis says, plain as day, what to expect, do not read the story and then leave reviews complaining about the content. You knew what you were getting into when you clicked the link. Don't like a particular pairing? Don't read that particular pairing. It's easy as that.

That's all for now. It's okay, I forgive you folks. everyone makes mistakes. Just...TRY to do better in the future, K? Thanks.

Gotta Catch 'Em All...

Today, boys and girls, we're going to talk a little about Pokemon.

For those of you who've been living with your head packed in ice for the last decade and are mentally underlining the word with a little red squiggle, Pokemon (That's POH-KAY-MON, by the way, a contraction of 'Pocket Monsters". There is not, and likely has never been, any such thing as 'Pokeyman".) is a Japanese franchise produced by Nintendo. There have been more spinoff products for Pokemon then there have been celebrities in rehab, including animes, card games, movies, action figures, stuffed animals, hats, clothes, alarm clocks, atom bombs, lawnmowers, mail-order brides, and toasters, but today we're going to discuss the video game that started the whole debacle.

In a nutshell, Pokemon is a role-playing game in which the player assumes the role of a ten-year-old child who, instead of going to school or anything silly like that, travels across the land, capturing a variety of mysterious magical monsters in specially designed monster-shrinking balls and training them to do battle against other mysterious magical monsters that other people have captured and trained to do the exact same thing. The whole thing is basically glorified cockfighting, but with a rock-paper-scissors twist. Each Pokemon, you see, can be categorized by one, or possibly two, of seventeen elemental 'types' that determine how much damage it will take from attacks of the same types. A Fire-type will take double damage from a Water-type attack, for example, while an Ice-type Pokemon will take double damage from fire-attacks. Their types also give resistances, as in the case of a Flying-type being immune to ground-attacks.

The premise is simple enough, as one might expect from a childrens' game (I surmise that this was originally intended to be marketed towards people of the same age group as the avatar), but there exists such a wide variety of monsters, moves, and items, that the sheer number of possible combinations and strategies for playing is absolutely mind-boggling. It is, literally, the most complex game that I have ever played...which is why I keep playing it, despite all its flaws.

And now we come to good part: expanding on those flaws.

First of all, the game suffers from Power Rangers Syndrome. The franchise has existed for well over a decade, but instead of adapting the material to suit the sensibilities of its aging demographic, the producers of the game expect new buyers to keep flowing in, keeping the game's style and content as juvenile as it ever was.
People, this is just plain stupid. If you have an established customer base of HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS OF OBSESSED CHILDREN (and in its heyday, the game did), there is absolutely no reason to let them slip through your fingers, banking on a fresh generation to get hooked just like the last one. TRENDS CHANGE. I will never understand why anyone allows this sort of thing to happen.
And the dialogue, yes, IS juvenile. It's trite and simplistic and cutesy and, while this sort of thing is to be expected from the children you encounter in the game, even the adults talk like the cast of Sesame Street.

Second, and this, in my mind, is the game's biggest flaw: Despite the seemingly infinite options available to the player as to how to train (which monsters to use, which moves to teach them, what items to equip to them, etc.) the player has absolutely NO IMPACT on the single-player campaign's plot. It's an oversight I keep hoping will be ammended with subsequent versions, but no. Five generations of game console upgrades into the series' run, and the pattern is completely unchanged. The player is given absolutely no options. You can have literally no impact at all on events.
Perhaps this wouldn't bother me so much, but for all the game's moralizing. I realize that with a premise like this, there has to be SOME rationale as to why forcing wild animals to duel for their owners' fun and profit isn't considered inhumane, but you're not even allowed to take a stance on the issue. One is forced on you, with your avatar, a silent protagonist, simply walking from encounter to encounter, tacitly agreeing with whatever the arbitrarily 'good' guys are saying and making what is considered a 'heroic' stand against the 'bad' guys.
There's even one point in the very first game where your character is offered a chance to join the antagonist's team, AND YOU AUTOMATICALLY REFUSE. I can't help but get the impression that the game is preaching to me. I don't listen to preaching from people I actually care about; I'm certainly not going to take it from a game that I PAID FOR.
A really good game, in my opninion, tries to give the player as many options as possible. Team Whatever is trying to take over the world, releasing a titanic Supermonster with which to terrorize the populace? Great. Awesome plot device. My friends are pressuring me to stop them? Yeah, I'd expect that from them. Am I going to?
Ah, now THAT should be up to me. I should have the option of stopping them, joining them, beating them to it and capturing the Supermonster to take over the world myself, or just ignoring the whole stupid hornet's nest, finding myself an island somewhere, building a castle and raising a bunch of sea serpents to eat any unwary intruders who threaten to bring the plot anywhere near me.
The funny thing? So far, in each and every game that's had this premise, you CAN catch the Supermonster. You just can't use it for anything but more deuling. Taking over the world is never an option. Agreeing with the 'bad' guys is never an option. Disagreeing with the 'good' guys is never an option. THERE ARE NO OPTIONS. You get a million different ways to do it, but no say in what you do.

People, for all its amazing complexity and innovation, for all the clever puns and bizarre creativity that's gone into the different monsters, despite the inescapable fact that no matter how many shameless knockoffs people try to make to capitalize on the monster-trainer theme, there will never, ever be anything quite like it...Pokemon, despite being a great game, will never, EVER be a good RPG. Not until it gets over this.

And maybe it's not trying to be. I guess it really doesn't have any reason to. It's wildly successful, after all, just the way it is.

But that just goes to show. Successful? Not the same as good.

Valentine out.