Tag Archives: opinion

Tuesday on the Soapbox

How Can I (or Anybody) Forgive All the Time?

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I talk about forgiveness a good bit, but it’s much more difficult than I make it out to be. Sometimes, I pretend to forgive, but I really don’t. When someone hurts me on purpose, I remember it, whether I want to or not, for a long time. Years later, when I meet people who have previously been mean to me, I remember what they did, and it still negatively colors my perception of them. I might be able to carry on a polite conversation, but the horrible memories of their hateful words and actions hang between us like dirty laundry, silent but still fluttering in the breeze.

And I have a feeling I’m not the only one who carries these kinds of feelings.

Silently Unforgiven

When people deliberately hurt me and don’t care that they hurt me, I find it almost impossible to let go of the hurt.

Take the gang of girls in 6th grade who routinely stood on each other’s shoulders in the bathroom to see down into my stall so that they could make fun of my privates and my pooched-out belly, and dumped bathroom trash down on my head while they were at it. And their teasing did not just confine itself to the bathroom–oh, no, they poked me in the back with the sharp ends of pencils in class, slapped my open locker door so that it would hit me in the head, and mocked me so hard about my partially-clad body in the girls’ locker room that I took to changing in the tiny bathroom stall. (Not to say that these girls DIDN’T try to wedge their heads underneath the door so they could see me doing that, too. Ended up having to stuff my gym bag under the door so they couldn’t get under it easily.)

Their daily humiliation tactics are still effective years later–I’m still hunching in shame writing this. And it seemed that most of my teachers were blissfully unaware of this, or they chose to ignore it because I was the “problem kid,” the one who always cried about everything. I never stopped bringing this to their attention, but it took my parents talking to my teachers to get them to see that I wasn’t making this stuff up just to get attention. And even then, the teachers’ solution was to “make me some friends,” allying me with one of my worst enemies in an attempt to keep me from being lonely. They made such halfhearted attempts to understand or rectify the situation that it was laughable, if I could have laughed by then.

If I was commanded to instantly forgive these girls (as God commands us all to forgive), I don’t know if I could, not even 14 years later. I still want to punch every one of them in the face and stomp on their necks for the senseless cruelty they dealt out to a naive 12-year-old who didn’t know how to fight back. I have had vivid, triumphant dreams in which I did just that, letting the weight of my body, which they mercilessly teased me about, crush their throats so that they strangled to death under my feet. That’s how much I still hate all of those girls…

…and I hate myself, for being so evil as to think such things about another human being.

Silently Strangling Myself with Memories

Those mean girls aren’t the only ones I have trouble forgiving, either. Especially in middle school, I had a profound hatred for most of the people I went to school with, because I was verbally and physically abused by many different kids (shoved against lockers, held against the wall and pinched/slapped, picked on for everything from my “high-water” pants to my developing chest and hips). And I got repeatedly told by school authorities to “be more mature” and stop disrupting class with my complaints about being treated this way. All I know is, if this had been done to me in the “real world” and the offenders had been 18 years old, they would have been put on trial and sent to jail. I have a hard time forgiving the students who did this to me, the other kids who just stood around and watched, and the school authorities who refused to believe me and took the word of my tormentors over mine.

I’m probably the only one who still remembers what these people said and did; it lives with me every day. But how can I forget what they did, when it harmed me so much, when it happened at a time that I was very vulnerable?

I forgive the new hurts in my life a little more easily, because any harm I receive these days is usually due to accident rather than malice–we’ve all grown up and become a little nicer to each other, at least most of the time. But the old, malicious hurts, the ones I received while still developing, are almost too scarred to ever return to normal. How can I let go of the bitterness and hurt, when that bitterness and hurt has been incorporated into me, has become part of my story and part of the way I react to certain people?

Speaking, Finally

Acknowledging this gap between false forgiveness (paying it lip service while still feeling bitter) and real forgiveness (truly accepting the other person’s error as just that, an error) is important. Forgiveness, eventually, comes through realizing that people are not just the sum of their errors. One reason I’m so guilt-ridden about the mistakes I’ve made in my own life is because I keep looking at my life as a whole and only seeing the places I messed up–I focus too hard on all my errors, and it makes me have a negative self-image overall. I am not just the sum of my errors, and neither is anybody else.

But just realizing that is not enough to be able to forgive. This hatred, this bitterness and resentment, is old and dried and caked on my spirit. I have lived with it so long that it has become part of me, and excising it will take time. Yes, that gang of 5 or 6 girls made a lot of mistakes when they treated me like that, but I doubt they would have cared if someone had told them it was a mistake. Malice against another person for no good reason is something I don’t understand. Vengeance, angry justice, is something I understand all too well, and it’s something I still hunger for. Forgiveness cannot come if you are still seeking vengeance…believe me, I’ve tried.

Like many people who have trouble forgiving senseless, malicious acts, I don’t understand why I was treated the way I was by so many people, and I will likely have trouble forgiving until I understand. I have tried to reason out why so many of my classmates might have struck out at me this way–possibly jealousy because of my academic record? Possibly personal insecurity just like mine? Possibly trying to climb the social ladder by doing what everybody else was doing–picking on me? But nothing seems to match with the particular brand of outright gleeful cruelty that was dealt out to me by the gang of girls I spoke of. I fear I will never understand why they felt the need to hurt another person who was clearly no threat to them, physically, mentally, or spiritually. By the end of 6th grade I was so bent and broken inside that I often wished I would die in my sleep…and it was largely due to them. I was more of a threat to myself than they were, strictly because I knew hurting or killing someone else was wrong. (Didn’t stop me from thinking about it, a LOT, but I never did it.)

Forgiveness, the Christian Way

I know that to follow God’s will and Jesus’ teachings, I must be able to forgive, not just partially, not just saying the words, but actually doing it. And so, I am praying the following prayer, starting tonight and every night until I can finally forgive:

Lord, you know my feelings about these girls. You know how much I hate them, how much I resent them and regard them with bitterness. Help me lift these terrible feelings away from myself and trust them to You. Help me realize that these girls are humans too, that they might have been suffering too, even though right now I cannot believe that. Work in my heart and help me heal.

Forgiveness, the Christian way, is a daily process, full of backsliding and regaining balance; it’s not a one-time deal at all. If it was, I’d have been done years ago. This may seem silly to pray about something 14 years in the past, but if I’m ever going to feel free of bitterness, I have to do this. It may be the only way to stop feeling strangled with bad memories.

Thursday in the Zone

The Maddening Efficiency of Poison Counters

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As a Magic player for several years (since 2004), I have made a name for myself among the local groups by playing a distinct “life-gain” style of play, also known as “stall.” I gain life and prevent damage in most of my decks, and do mainly combat damage as a win condition; this allows the other player to play their strategy, but most of the time they cannot actually do me any lasting damage. In my eyes, it’s a win-win, because I get to play my strategy without being overly worried about my life total, and they get to see how their deck plays in extreme long-game, with plenty of time for joking around and socializing in the process.

However, a not-so-new mechanic that was revived in Scars of Mirrodin threatens this easy and relatively carefree way of playing. It’s called poison counters.

Poison Counters Before Scars of Mirrodin

In the 1994 Magic set Legends, the first cards dealing with the “poison counter” effect were printed. Poison counters were a new way to win or lose the game–if a player accumulated 10 poison counters, they automatically lost the game, no matter what their life total was. It was, in a way, a second type of life total, even though the creators of the game still refuse to acknowledge it as such.

From 1994 to 1997, Wizards of the Coast worked with poison counters in several of its sets. Expansions such as The Dark, 4th Edition, Chronicles, Homelands, Alliances, Mirage, Visions, and 5th Edition each had just a few cards sprinkled in that concerned poison counters. Within these sets, poison counters were generally dealt directly by creatures, usually with wording such as “When [card name] deals damage to a player, that player gets X amount of poison counters”, not always matching how much damage the creature dealt.

Because of the fairly scant number of cards dealing with poison counters, it was somewhat difficult to incorporate into an entire deck strategy. Thus, the mechanic did not see a whole lot of play after these sets faded into memory.

Poison Counters Since Scars of Mirrodin

Fast-forward thirteen years, to 2010–the release of Scars of Mirrodin, and the introduction of a very new and quite deadly mechanic: infect. This new mechanic combined the effects of two other fairly good mechanics, “poisonous” and “wither,” into one super-powered game-changer for any creature.

With the advent of infect, previously small one-drop, 1/1 creatures with very little prowess to their name could become killing machines in their own right. They could wither away the opponent’s creatures, but they could also give undefended players a poison counter. And once given one poison counter, opponents were then susceptible to a mechanic called “proliferate,” which allowed the proliferate-wielding player to “choose any number of permanents and/or players with counters on them, then give each another counter of a kind already there,” according to the official rules reminder text.

This substantially increased the playability of poison counter strategies. With so many new infect creatures and so many new proliferating spells and permanents, it was suddenly viable–and suddenly very deadly, not just to tournament players, but to the global Magic-playing population.

My Beef with Poison Counters

Even though most of Magic’s developers don’t want to believe that poison counters represent a second type of life total, they are. They represent a 10-turn clock in the background of the game, which is completely at the mercy of the other player, especially thanks to infect and proliferate. What’s more, they are a life total that to date, players have only two ways to change:

  • Leeches, a card from the much-maligned set Homelands, gets rid of all poison counters on a target player, and transfers it to damage to the regular life total instead;
  • Melira, Sylvok Outcast, from New Phyrexia, prevents its controller from getting poison counters, and directly counters the infect keyword and its -1/-1 effect on creatures.

Damage, I can deal with easily–it’s called Holy Day and Fog. Loss of life, I can spring back from; Life Burst and Beacon of Immortality for the win. Poison counters? With only two cards in the ENTIRE GAME to counter this strategy and take back control of my own poison counter total, it’s a very small chance that I have those cards and can make them work in one of my existing decks, or build a new deck with them in it that makes any kind of cohesive strategy.

Furthermore, poison counters are a death stroke to my typical gameplay style of “casual, slow and steady, more joking than playing.” I can’t have fun and be casual when I have an uncontrollable clock of counters going in the background the entire game. I’m forced into running scared the whole game, trying to outrun my typically Standard-format opponent with Vintage-format decks that just were not made to counter this kind of strategy. It feels like I’m taking a timed final exam that I didn’t study for. I hate being timed, especially when I don’t control the clock and don’t have the right resources or knowledge to finish the test of skill.

I thought Magic was supposed to be a game, but poison counters have changed the whole face of it. If the game developers are truly trying to make Magic into a purely competitive, cutthroat game, then they’re succeeding–they have just taken a major step toward stamping out Casual Play once and for all. Yes, it’s a great mechanic; it’s effective, and it forces people to play quickly and powerfully. But it’s far too competitive for those of us who use Magic and other GAMES to relax and have a good time with friends.

Warning, This Gamer’s Climbing onto Her Soapbox!

To me, poison counters represent everything that’s wrong with Magic these days. Yes, I know, I sound like an old fuddy-duddy, waving my proverbial cane about and muttering “Well, in MY day, WE didn’t HAVE no stinkin’ poison counters and tournaments!” But it’s true–Magic has grown exponentially more competitive as the mass of Standard-playing customers has increased in size, and the game developers seem to be pandering more toward this aggressive, tournament-winning style of play.

Now, I’ll freely admit, I don’t think I’ve ever won a Magic tournament, because the deck styles that I most enjoy playing are meant more for multi-player games and extreme-long-game setups. (In multi-player games, I’m liable to win without anybody realizing how powerful I’ve become until it’s too late. In one-on-one games, I am wiped off the map before my first combo piece is on the board.) But I LIKED playing casually and playing multi-player. I LIKED just playing silly combos that only affect me and create a hilarious situation, like being able to gain 64 life off a single Life Burst because of Boon Reflection and having 3 Life Bursts in the graveyard. Gaining astronomical amounts of life doesn’t hurt anybody else, and it’s hysterical to watch.

But with most of the local gamers I know going over to the “dark side” of strictly tournament play, my favorite style of playing is nearly extinct. Everyone is either playing the more aggressive mechanics and more recent formats, playing me one-on-one and wiping the floor with me, or taking me down with poison counters that I can’t control. As my blog title says, poison counters (and mechanics like it) are maddeningly efficient. They’re maddeningly efficient at making me and other casual players like me quit the game entirely, because it’s no longer fun–it’s a gun fight, and I came equipped with a butter knife.

How Can We Defend Against Poison Counters?

Well, now that I’ve said my piece about how Magic seems to be going all uber-competitive, how can players work around these annoying little poison counters?

Besides using Leeches or Melira, Sylvok Outcast, there ARE ways to defend against getting poison counters, as listed below:

  1. Blocking any and all Infect creatures. Make sure the creature you block with has a larger toughness so that it can survive the -1/-1 hit!
  2. Removing or destroying Infect creatures and Proliferating permanents. Disenchant, Naturalize, Doom Blade, Swords to Plowshares, Path to Exile, Shock, Lightning Bolt, and Shriekmaw are just a few cards off the top of my head that can help this cause.
  3. Countering Infect creature spells and Proliferating permanent spells. Blue always has an answer for everything.

Even a primarily Vintage player like me can find ways to use the above strategies to protect myself from poison counters. After all, I play big-toughness creatures as a rule of thumb, and I also enjoy pumping my little creatures to stronger power and toughness to overcome my opponent, so I do have at least the ability to block the infect creatures. I also run a good deal of creature removal and enchantment/artifact destruction in most of my decks, so I can get rid of permanents that could proliferate what poison counters I have. And while I don’t run a lot of Red, Blue, or Black, I can occasionally Shock and Bolt some of the smaller infect creatures if I have to.

It is important to note, however, that not every deck can encompass these strategies. For those of us who build decks and rarely change them because they work so well, it’s annoying to have to change out some parts to a well-oiled machine just because of one mechanic. But if you want to survive in today’s Magic: the Gathering, you sometimes have to sacrifice the beauty of a well-designed Vintage- or Legacy-format strategy in order to build “what works” against the mechanic flavor of the month. “What works” may not be exactly your cup of tea, but it will give you a better chance to win, and perhaps a chance to have that fleeting, mythical experience called “fun” again.

More About Poison Counters and Player Discussions of Strategy

From wiki.mtgsalvation.com:

Ways to Remove Poison Counters? @ TappedOut.net
Need Help Preventing/Removing Poison Counters @ MTGFanatic.com
Complete list of cards that directly deal with poison counters @ Gatherer

Thursday in the Zone

Strategy Porting, part 3: Playing by Proxy

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strategyporting3
As part 1 and part 2 of this gaming strategy series will attest, I’ve been trying to “port” in a strategy from the Yu-Gi-Oh! trading card game to Magic: the Gathering. This has not been an easy process, but I’m continuing to work on finding matching cards and strategies that will work within M:TG’s color wheel of White, Blue, Red, Black, and Green.

If you’re following this process, you inevitably reach a point where you know generally what you want in the deck and you’re ready for a test run. But before you start buying or trading for actual physical cards, you need to make sure the items you’re getting will actually end up in the deck. That’s why I suggest the following practice of proxying your deck-in-progress.

Testing Your Strategies with Proxies

Okay, okay, I know, “proxy” is a bad word to most “serious” (read: competitive) Magic players. But for those of us who don’t win Standard tournaments (and/or buy lots of cards) on a regular basis, using proxies can be remarkably effective at building and testing new decks. It lets you test the strategies first to see if they even work for your deck!

Paper Proxies

hedroncrab_proxy At their most low-tech, proxies can be as simple as cutting up a sheet of paper to make small slips that you can write the card name and effect on, like my craptastic Hedron Crab proxy at left. Paper-proxied decks (decks with paper copies of cards, whether it’s printed out or written out by hand) are generally not allowed in tournaments, but they are great for testing out your new deck in a casual setting.

(WARNING: don’t ever print high-quality proxies and try to sell them as the real card–you will definitely end up with mad customers, and possibly the game designers could sue you! I use proxies strictly for deck testing, and trust me, nobody wants my quick-made, scrawled-handwriting paper proxies. XD)

Virtual Proxies

If you don’t want to go the paper-and-pen route with your proxies, you can also build a virtual deck on a service like LackeyCCG, which is a free program you can use to build decks and test against a “dummy player,” or even a real online player if you wish. (Be warned, it’s a jungle of occasionally mean competitive players out there!)

This kind of service is pretty good, but I still prefer to test my decks in real life against another player. If you like to speed-test your decks more and prefer not to use a deck until you’ve thoroughly tested it, however, LackeyCCG and its ilk could be just right for you.

Summary

Proxying is a great way to try out cards without having to invest the money in them just yet, which is key for porting in an old strategy to a new game. Give it a try, and see how this can help you create your new-old deck!

Saturday with the Spark

“But I’m Not Good Enough to be an Artist”

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butimnotgoodenough
Okay, first of all, I want to refute the statement in my title. When someone says “But I’m not good enough to be an artist,” I want to say back, “Who says??”

Breaking the Art/Artist Stereotype

For too long, art has been given this elevated, almost holier-than-anything status in our culture. And people we call “artists,” stereotypically speaking, are people who dress in “artsy”-looking clothes (all black and berets are the cliche), who claim that no one understands their art, who seem to be just a little bit unhinged at times, who rarely go out into the world so as not to disturb their “creative process.” Right?

NOPE. Artists are everywhere, talented in many different art forms, and they are not all intensely focused people, or all hoity-toity about their art. And art can be found in all parts of life. In fact, Grandma’s herb garden is just as much an art form as any painting or dance performance.

Art is Everywhere

Our whole culture is full of art. Art is self-expression, not just talent in a particular subject that seems “artsy.”

It pains me to say this, being a math-phobe as I am, but even math has artistic qualities–ever heard of fractal geometry, for instance? And even the symmetry of a perfectly-solved equation has beauty in it (even though I might have no idea how in the world it got solved that way). People who create beauty in their worlds are artists, whether they are organizing the clutter out of your apartment or rescuing your workplace’s database from certain cyber-doom.

Art is Approachable

Art does not have to be created in a vacuum void of anything except your own thoughts. In fact, art can be created as a result of human interaction, even as a result of crowds of people. The susurrus of many people talking can sound like a bumblebee’s whirring wings, which might just put you in mind of “Flight of the Bumblebee,” and inspire you to create something based on that, for instance.

You also don’t have to be a particular kind of “focused person” to create art. Sometimes, the random doodles you make on a paper napkin could be inspiration for a design you end up using in your home office, for instance. Art is everyday and yet it transcends the everyday. I like to think art just makes regular life a little bit spiffier. ^_^

Art Can Be Done by Anybody

You can become an artist even if you don’t think of yourself as creative. Anything you do well, whether at your job, at home, or out and about, can be art. Shopping can be an art. Fixing computers or cars can be an art. Whatever you do that you have great instincts for and a large amount of technical knowledge of, you can transform that into art by lending your passion for it into every action and thought. If it expresses who you are (like if your ability to organize and save money lends itself to shopping on a budget), that is part of your art.

And you don’t have to have just one type of art in your life, either–I am expressed by many different kinds of art, from songwriting to blogging, from beading to web designing, and on beyond.

Try a Little Art for Yourself

Even if you don’t think you’re creative, even if you think art is for elementary school kids, how about trying some of the artistic pursuits available to you? The following list is a starter list, but feel free to come up with your own!

  • Jewelry designing (beading, etc.)
  • Painting and modeling gaming pieces
  • Fabric crafting (sewing, fabric painting, etc.)
  • Woodworking
  • Painting
  • Gardening
  • Drawing/sketching
  • Interior designing
  • Acting
  • Cooking
  • Car detailing/finishing
  • Composing poetry
  • Couponing (just not the “extreme,” lawbreaking kind)
  • Short story writing
  • Organizing
  • Computer building
  • Novel writing
  • Web designing
  • Dancing (ballet, modern dance, etc.)
Thursday in the Zone

Strategy Porting, part 2: The Card Hunt

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strategyporting2
In my introductory post about strategy porting, I talked about wanting to port one of my old Yu-Gi-Oh! decks into Magic: the Gathering–specifically, I wanted to recreate a very control-based deck that worked around getting a bunch of Flip-Effect monsters into the graveyard so that Shadow Ghoul and Chaos Necromancer could be bigger attackers.

This has proven to be much harder than it first seemed. 😛

Problem #1: No Flip-Effect Creatures in Magic

The Morph mechanic does exist in M:TG, but for what I want the creatures to do, there’s not really any Morph cards that do the effects for any kind of reasonable cost. Plus, the ability of Flip-Effect monsters in Yu-Gi-Oh! to block an attack and THEN have an effect go off is hard to replicate in Magic anyway.

Problem #2: No One Color Does It All

If you want “destroy creatures” and “sacrifice creatures” effects, you look to Black. If you want “return creatures to owner’s hand” and “mill top four or five cards,” you look to Blue. If you want “sacrifice this creature to gain a bunch of life,” you look to White. See where I’m going with this?

With Yu-Gi-Oh!, you don’t have to worry about being able to play your creatures with specific colors of mana. This enables you to have a toolbox-style deck like the one I’ve assembled. But with Magic, if I want to have a deck that is able to play what it needs to play, I have to make sure I’m not running a crazy five-color deck where I’ll never get the amounts of mana I need.

Problem #3: Might Not End Up Being the Same Kind of Deck

While the surprise effects of a Flip-Effect monster in Yu-Gi-Oh is almost impossible to match in Magic, there is something that does match the surprise factor: instants. Casting an instant in response to another player’s attack can give the same net effect as a Flip-Effect monster.

However, if I start building the deck with all instants and sorceries instead of creatures, the strategy won’t be quite the same. No longer will I be able to amass a creature-filled graveyard and mow down people with the Magic equivalent of Chaos Necromancer, Mortivore. Instead, it will be almost a creatureless deck…not exactly what I intended.

Some Light at the End of the Tunnel

I agree, there are problems with porting a strategy…but there is hope. Going through the card database available on Gatherer, I was able to find at least some cards that matched up to what I’d like to replicate from my old deck. A partial list appears below, sticking to Blue and Black as the main colors of the deck:

Creature-Destroying Creatures

  • Blind Zealot
  • Shriekmaw
  • Necrite
  • Wall of Corpses

Creature-Destroying Spells

  • Bone Splinters
  • Chainer’s Edict
  • Witch’s Mist
  • Wretched Banquet

Creature-Bouncing Creatures

  • AEther Adept
  • Barrin, Master Wizard
  • Man-O’-War
  • Waterfront Bouncer

Creature-Bouncing Spells

  • AEther Spellbomb
  • Peel from Reality
  • Unsummon
  • Seal of Removal

Card-Milling Creatures

  • Hedron Crab
  • Cathartic Adept
  • Merfolk Mesmerist
  • Riddlekeeper

Card-Milling Spells

  • Brain Freeze
  • Vision Charm
  • Horrifying Revelation
  • Memory Sluice

Damage-Preventing Creatures

  • Fog Bank
  • Cephalid Illusionist

Damage-Preventing Spells

  • Darkness

Life-Loss/Direct Damage Creatures

  • Bile Urchin
  • Death Cultist
  • Blightspeaker
  • Cabal Archon

Life-Loss/Direct Damage Spells

  • Ebony Charm
  • Geth’s Verdict
  • Misery Charm
  • Hideous End

Card-Drawing Creatures

  • Sage of Epityr
  • Hapless Researcher
  • Drowned Rusalka
  • Alchemist’s Apprentice

Card-Drawing Spells

  • Accumulated Knowledge
  • Brainstorm
  • Visions of Beyond
  • Thought Scour

Life-Gaining Creatures

  • Deathgreeter
  • Child of Night
  • Vampire Nighthawk
  • Gutless Ghoul

Life-Gaining Spells

  • Douse in Gloom
  • Plunge into Darkness
  • Devour Flesh
  • Crypt Incursion

How to Do a Search Like This for Yourself

  • Search out the abilities you need, narrowing the focus by colors, then type of card.
  • If you’re trying to build within a certain format (such as Standard, keep set printings in mind as you search.
  • Be open to new ways to include an effect (such as finding life-gain in Black rather than White).

On to Part 3: Playing by Proxy!

Tuesday on the Soapbox

A Day in My Body

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adayinmybody
Author’s Note: What you are about to read is a composite “day in my body,” involving all the pains and aches (and troubles) I’m likely to face on any given day. After all, no one knows exactly what anyone goes through in their daily lives, and that’s my point; I write this to talk about pain and fatigue in a personal, immediate way.

This post outlines a pretty typical day for me back in 2011–ankle pains, knee pains, headaches, and all. Even though I have had some relief from my headaches since then, it still shocks me that I do indeed go through most of these events every day. I guess even pain becomes customary and normal after a while. Yikes, what a thought. 🙁

This post might not be the most enjoyable (or interesting) I’ve ever written, but it is certainly eye-opening. If we all lived a day in another person’s body, what might we experience? What might we suffer?

Waking Up…In Pain

The insistent MAINK-MAINK-MAINK-MAINK of the alarm clock startles you out of bed. Actually, you weren’t really asleep–you’ve been going in and out of sleep for the last hour, lying there on your side. Too many things to think about, too much to do today…and since your flattened pillow was crammed against the loose headboard, your neck and head are burning with pain anyway. It’s almost more of a relief to sit up and shut the irritating alarm off.

Right foot hits the floor, and the old familiar lightning strike of pain zaps your heel, zipping up the back of your leg, threatening to crumple your knee even as you try to put weight on it. Familiar as this pain is, it’s still a shock to the system. Depending on your left leg (the obedient one, at least this week), you hobble to the bathroom; even after eight hours of rest, your right ankle is still swollen and hurts, just as it has hurt every morning for years.

Getting Ready for the Day, And Already Tired

Completing your morning ablutions is a sorry task this early in the morning. Having to depend on your left leg yet again in the shower makes the whole leg a little sore, but it’s better than dealing with the brain-jangling pain in your right ankle and foot arch (the one that never existed thanks to genetics). Murphy’s Law dictates that next week, your left ankle and left foot arch will be the ones acting up every morning–you just hope your right ankle is a little better by then.

As you descend the stairs to the basement to retrieve clothes, one step at a time, you’re not sure which ankle hurts less. Each time your heel strikes another stairstep, there’s a sharp clanging pain like horribly-out-of-tune church bells in your nerves. But it must be done, and you clump down the stairs heavily, stumbling by the time you reach the basement.

You struggle to fit your jiggling thighs and tummy into panties and then jeans, “dancing” into them to fit the fabric around your hips and waist. Elastic leg bands slide perfectly into the grooves between thighs and stomach, binding your flesh tightly, as underwear has done since you were eleven years old. Zipper and button tightens the waist of your jeans, though there was no chance of the taut fabric going anywhere even without being fastened–the 10-inch difference between waist and hips takes care of that.

Shirts are a little less difficult, but you still look lumpy and saggy in the mirror. Even the expensive plus-size bras don’t make you look your age–it looks like you’ve already had several children and never gave them a bottle of store-bought formula in their lives. Weight drags at your shape in every direction, most evident when you try to haul your 300-pound mass back up the stairs; knees crunch painfully with every upward step, and weakened ankles threaten to roll inward and crumple your legs as you pull yourself up.

The Walmart Trip of Fail

Getting dressed and getting back up the stairs was enough of a challenge, it seems–you’re already out of breath, and disgusted with yourself for it. You had planned to go to Walmart today to pick up groceries, but your ankle angrily disagrees. Even thinking about the walk in from the inordinately-large parking lot is unbearable at this point. Why bother going, when you’re only going to get to the door and want to just turn around and go home?

It takes a lot of motivation to finally get up the courage to go out. Strapping on the black ankle stabilizer brace provides a momentary flood of relief; if only the thing were waterproof so you could wear it in the shower. Maybe then the ankle would feel well enough to conquer Walmart. As it is, you will settle for just picking up what you absolutely need and getting out of there without standing in horrible lines that make the soles of your feet burn.

Walking the aisles at Walmart–or any large store, actually–is a grand adventure in Tantalus-like torture. So many things you want to see and do, and yet your ankles and knees have put you on a strict timer: “5 more minutes and we’re done,” they shout. Never mind that it will take 5 minutes just to pick up one of the items you need. You end up pushing past that horrible time limit, but the growing pain on the outside of your right ankle indicates swelling, again. You’ll be paying for that later, and not with a debit card.

Noon comes, and sees you coming home with groceries in tow; hitting the gas pedal with your right foot is only marginally less painful than standing in the lines. You really wish the woman in front of you had not mistaken the “20 Items Or Less” line for the “Customer Screams at Cashier for 10 Minutes” line. But you’re seated again and you’re back to your usual self, not emotionally strained and near to bursting out with anger, like you feel when you stand for long periods of time. Driving is a lot less painful, and you feel the blood pressure in your temples receding, even though your right temple is beginning to throb with the first teasing poke of a headache.

Headache Comes to Join the “Party”

Later in the afternoon, after you’ve come home and unloaded the groceries, you’re lying in bed, luxuriating in being off your swollen ankles. The right one is currently lying atop a towel-covered ice pack–cold has never felt so good. It’s good to be off your feet, and you try to get a little bit of computer work done (typing, designing, and writing), only to realize that the teasing headache of a few hours ago is now starting to bloom into your face and down your neck on the right side. Turning your head and trying to pop your neck results in a short respite, but the pain comes roaring right back, burning along nerve endings, turning your pulse into a painful drumbeat. This pain centers in the right temple, making vision flash and concentration almost impossible within minutes.

Hours Later and No Relief, As Usual

Lying in your darkened room, the classic treatment for a migraine, your ankle lies forgotten for the moment on its ice pack. It’s now been an hour since you took your prescription “migraine medicine,” and 30 minutes since you took an Advil Migraine, and yet the pain still surges through your temple, making the whole right side of your face feel funny. If you press your fingers to your temple, you can feel a blood vessel, corded and thick, pounding right under your fingertips. You’ve had all sorts of headaches all your life, ranging from the dull thump of a sinus headache to the sharp, eye-searing classic migraine, but this is a headache in its own class…and medicines do not touch it, just as medicines do not completely soothe your crunching knees and swelling ankles.

Nighttime–You’ve Made It One More Day

As evening falls, you manage to take in a little TV, along with a little bit to eat…the headache won’t allow much past your lips, but you’ve got to eat something. The ankle, as if sensing its complaints won’t be paid much attention, has quit aching quite so much, so the stumble to the kitchen is less painful than you feared a few hours ago. Now the goal is to ease the headache enough to sleep–except for the fact that every position your neck gets put in to go to sleep results in alarmingly-worse pain rocketing up into your head.

You end up resting propped against the headboard for a blessed hour or two, until at last the headache loosens its death-grip on your temple and eases off just enough for you to sleep. Sleep dulls the pain, but it will wake you again in the morning; the irritating MAINK-MAINK-MAINK-MAINK of the alarm will not be needed tomorrow morning, because it will already be jangling in your nerves.

Monday in the HTMLab

Keeping Up with the Webmasters

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keepingupwithwebmasters
Just like clothing fashions, web fashions go in and out of style, even within a year. I remember when transparent iframes and HTML tables were all the rage back in the mid-2000s, for instance. Today’s super-sleek, Apple-Corporation-like webdesigns are on trend for the moment, but they may fall by the wayside soon. And, when they do fall out of fashion, most of us webdesigners will feel the pressure to “move with the times.”

I say, however, that we don’t necessarily have to throw out all of our “old” design practices with every new trend that comes along. Instead of “keeping up with the Joneses” (or the webmasters), how about some “timeless Internet fashion” blended in with new trends?

Timeless Webdesign Tip #1: Create a Design that’s Easy to Use

Whatever content you have, whether it’s text article, photos, videos, sound clips, etc., make sure your site is easy to read and browse:

  • Design attractive but not distracting images
  • Use just little strokes of bright color to accent new content
  • Space out your content to break up “walls of text”
  • Ensure that there’s a strong contrast between your text color and background color

A site that’s easy to look at and use is a site that will please visitors. Think about what you like to see when you visit a site–this will help you get the design process started.

Timeless Webdesign Tip #2: Keep your Site Organized

Group your pages together logically in your navigation structure, and create a sitemap for larger sites. You can also put in breadcrumb navigation if you have lots of subsections.

Having an organized site makes it easier for your visitors to find what they’re looking for on your site, which means they will more likely return for another visit. And isn’t that what all us webdesigners want?

Timeless Webdesign Tip #3: Interpret New Webdesign Trends for Yourself

Instead of copycatting what everyone else seems to be doing in webdesign, take time to study the new style, and figure out what you like about it. Use web trends as a way to inform and inspire your designs, not as a rigid rulebook for how you “ought to” make your sites look.

You might find, for instance, that you like that new color scheme everyone seems to be raving about, but you don’t like the layout it’s commonly used with. Instead of forcing yourself to use a layout you don’t like, just incorporate your most favorite parts of the color scheme into a layout of your own making. This keeps your site looking fresh and updated, without forcing it into a design cookie-cutter.

Summary

Since web trends are almost always changing, but there are definitely design concepts that never go out of style–and there are ways to personalize each trend for yourself as it comes along. After all, who wants to browse 10 different sites that all look the same? Help your site stand out with your own personal style!

Saturday with the Spark

C-Sharp (aka D-flat): A Key of Many Moods

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As I’ve related in earlier posts, C-sharp/D-flat is my favorite key to hear music played in. Since I am a sound-color synesthete with perfect pitch, I experience C-sharp as sparkling crystals on deep violet backgrounds, and the feeling of velvet. It feels like HOME. Strange word to describe a musical key, I know, but it just feels stable, strong, resonant…beautiful. F-sharp is a nice place to visit, a vacation home, perhaps, but C-sharp is truly home.

C-Sharp: Expressive and Flexible

I also find C-sharp to be a wonderful key for exploring and expressing all different types of moods, more so than any other key. I’m a composer (have been since sixth grade), and I’ve loved using C-sharp major and minor for many of my songs, because it just seemed to fit them. For me, the keys of F and B-flat seem stuck in celebratory modes, while G and E are for country songs, and C is so ubiquitous as to be too simple. (Of course, there are exceptions to every rule and every perception, but I’m speaking rather generally.) C-sharp, by contrast, seems to be endlessly flexible in every emotional direction, which delights me.

(This preference of one key over another may seem to many like a preference of spaghetti over linguine–isn’t it all still music, just as spaghetti and linguine are both still pasta? Well, like the kids who insist that the two types of pasta just TASTE different, I insist that a song played in a different key lends the song a whole new “vibe,” an entirely different feeling. When radio stations play songs a half-step higher to speed up the song slightly, it changes the song, however subtly.)

Examples of Musical Moods in C-Sharp

When I was considering all my favorite aspects of C-sharp for this blog post, I listened through my iTunes playlist of “C-sharp Major and Minor” songs (yep, I’ve set aside an entire playlist for it). As I listened, it occurred to me–it seems I’m not alone in perceiving C-sharp as a flexible and beautiful key, at least among composers and musical artists! Take the following list, compiled of several of my favorite songs in C-sharp major of minor, that describe vastly differing moods and sounds:


Anger: “Harder to Breathe” – Maroon 5


Joy: “Uptight (Everything’s Alright)” – Stevie Wonder


Drama: “Hindi Sad Diamonds” from the Moulin Rouge soundtrack


Love: “All I Ask of You” from Phantom of the Opera – Sarah Brightman & Steve Barton


Pleading: “Goin’ Crazy” – Natalie


Tranquility: “Rainsong (Fortune’s Lullaby)” – George Winston


Fear/Anxiety: “Somebody’s Watching Me” – Rockwell


Passion/Drive: “Fantaisie Impromptu” – Frederic Chopin


Desire: “Whine Up (feat. Elephant Man)” – Kat DeLuna

There’s a fairly wide range of genres and subject matters in that list, and that’s just taken from my personal song collection. Who knows how many other composers have found C-sharp to be as lovely a key as I do?

Tuesday on the Soapbox

A Cluttered Mind

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aclutteredmind
Many of us suffer from physical clutter in our homes (myself included). It’s a modern housekeeping malady–we have tons of stuff, lying all over the place or squirreled away wherever it can fit. Most of us don’t even want to THINK about opening our storage closets or outbuildings anymore.

Clutter Isn’t Just Physical

But clutter doesn’t just manifest as piles of old receipts on the desk or stacks of old books on the floor. Clutter appears also in our heads. I find myself pushing aside various half-completed mental to-do lists and worries in order to try to complete a task; when I drive, I often start sorting through old guilt, things I forgot to do, and random ideas that pop to mind when, of course, I can’t stop to write them down.

Yep, my mind is a very cluttered place, just like many of the rooms in my house. Any horizontal space in my home is instantly a clutter magnet, and any free neurons in my brain are instantly taken up with endlessly processing and reprocessing worry and guilt. The worry is about tomorrow, and the guilt is about yesterday. Today is too full of failing to even process most of the time.

I would feel fairly safe in guessing that most of us suffer from cluttered minds. If you look at the increasing instances of car accidents, workplace problems, and relationship/family strife, it all seems to point to stress and overcrowded minds. Victims and perpetrators of car accidents alike say “I never saw him/her coming,” for instance. We were too mentally busy to properly look, perhaps, or to properly brake to avoid an accident. I’ve had more than a few near misses myself, so it’s easy for anybody to slip up. We also slip up in our emotional lives, hurting others and never even noticing because of the mental clutter we are tripping over.

Housekeeping for the Mind

Trying to de-junk our homes is one thing. It seems to be easier to separate out what is clearly too broken to save, too dirty to bother cleaning, and too old to matter when we are handling physical objects–well, at least for people who don’t hoard random stuff like Propel water bottles. (Not my finest moment, I assure you.)

But what about de-junking our brains? It’s much more difficult to discard old bad memories, especially when it seems like they hold a terrible truth about the kind of people we really are inside.

For example: Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about the time I chucked a rock behind me during recess, trying to get back at some of the mean boys who were throwing rocks at my legs as I ran by. I hit another little girl instead, and I really hurt her leg–bruised it up something awful. And I never truly apologized. It’s been almost twenty years and I still think about it, because in those moments I was vengeful and selfish, and it led to carelessness that hurt someone else. And not only did I hurt someone, I never apologized. Is that the kind of person other people remember me as? Is that the kind of person I still am?

That’s one small example of my guilty mental clutter, among the many dirty and shameful memories I have stacked in my mental closet. It’s like I hoard these memories as a reminder that I am capable of being an awful person, just in case I ever get a little bit too full of myself, just a little too proud of the person I’ve become.

I have a feeling that a lot of us do this to ourselves, maybe not always to de-puff our egos, but for reasons of our own. Maybe we feel we’re not good enough to warrant being happy, or maybe we keep these old memories around as a way of keeping ourselves from backsliding back to where we were. In any case, these cluttered memories, those old worries, guilt, and fears, keep us from living the kind of life we want to live, just as the stacks and stacks of junk in my room right now are keeping me from living the kind of life I want for myself. We can make ourselves literally sick doing this kind of stuff to our minds–anxiety, depression, insomnia, and chronic stress don’t just appear from nowhere.

Courage to Pick up the Mental Broom

If we want uncluttered minds, we have to be willing to work to clear it. My very wise and very forgiving boyfriend has talked with me often about letting go of old guilt, even saying one time, “You know, you’re probably the only one who even remembers that this happened. If the people you hurt or offended that long ago have forgotten it, then why are you still holding on to it?”

I explained my point above, about my old actions possibly revealing an ugly truth about me, and he said, “Well, if you didn’t have any flaws and never made any mistakes, you’d be Jesus, and as awesome as Jesus is, I don’t know if I could date Him.” We laughed, but he was right. I needed to let go of old junk in my head; even if the “ugly truth” was true at the time, I can work now to fix that flaw in myself now. People can change, houses can be clean again, and minds can be clear.

I can’t say I sleep like a baby at night now, because I don’t. I still have old guilt and new worries swirling about on my mental floor. But at least I am now armed with a broom, and can sweep those problems out. You can be armed with a mental broom, too.

Thursday in the Zone

The Best Offense is a Good Defense–Wait, What?

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bestoffensegooddefense
[/shameless paraphrase of cliche]

A quick, efficient win is usually prized among gamers, especially when playing competitively. But let me bend your thoughts a minute. What if, instead of looking to win quickly, you wanted a SATISFYING game? A game that took a little while but afforded a win you could actually savor?

This second approach is my philosophy on gaming. I don’t want just a quick, easy win–it feels like cheating, or like eating cotton candy for dinner. I’d rather have a game which makes me think and allows me to socialize a little, too. I favor long games–which means that I play defensively.

Thinking Defensively Rather Than Aggressively

aggressivedefensive
If you want to play defensively, you’ve got to think long-term, because aggressive players will burn themselves out quickly. “Aggro” Magic: the Gathering players, for instance, soon run out of cards in hand and have less options to defend themselves. Aggressive Clix players usually wear out their first-string attackers by mid-game, leaving themselves only their second-string attackers and their support crew (if that).

So, a defensive strategy that wins has to have 3 basic prongs:

  • High defenses/support to stay alive long-term
  • Strategies that punish the other player for attacking
  • Good resource management/game control

Defensive Strategy Examples

Magic: the Gathering

  • Life-gain to offset opponent’s direct damage
  • Graveyard recursion to foil any milling or discard
  • High-toughness creatures to both block combat damage and deal a little combat damage of my own
  • Mill, board wipes, discard, targeted destruction, and other minor control elements to stay alive

HeroClix

  • A couple of Medics to heal wounded figures
  • Several sources of Probability Control and Outwit, to reroll dice and get rid of particularly damaging powers and abilities
  • A Mystic or two and some Wildcards, to punish the opponent for attacking me
  • Figures with high defenses (18+), or figures with Energy Shield/Deflection or Combat Reflexes

The Reason I Include Control With High-Defense Strategies

As I have learned from experience, if you focus on nothing but defense, you will get controlled and manipulated into destruction. Black and Blue Magic decks with a lot of control elements will keep a high-defense White deck from doing anything, for instance, while 6 or 7 damage from Vet Icons Superman holding an object will KO any support piece before you can use it.

As a defense player, you have to have a modicum of control included in your strategy, but you don’t have to make it irritating–just a strategically-placed and protected Windborn Muse can be enough to stop aggro, and a Story Circle can prevent even the fastest of Burn decks from hurting you once it’s out. Likewise, using Outwitters and long-range pieces can help your defensive HeroClix team win the day.

Summary

Defense is often discounted in most collectible card and miniatures games, but it’s a key strategy in a long-term game. Sure, if you want a 5-minute win, aggression is still your best way, but if you like longer games with more chances to socialize and more chances to laugh, playing “de” might be your best way to do that.