my baby's in the white fluffy clouds

I spent this past weekend at a Magic tournament called "Cardmaggedon" which was... much smaller than expected, but that meant I won $150 despite not doing super well, so, hooray? I've gone to big tournaments a few times in the last couple of months (one in LA, one in Oakland, and this one in Las Vegas) and the LA trip I took with a group of friends and the other two I was supposed to end up with friends but ended up alone. Not totally alone --- a friend from outside Magic happened to be at the first day of the Oakland event and that was great, and people I know but don't consider (close?) friends from Tucson were in Vegas --- but pretty much "done playing cards, walk/transit back to place I am staying, order food, read more about magic" alone. This kind of sucks, as raxes are extroverts and really like having people around for that kind of recharge time. But I would do it again. (And, in fact, am doing it again in Denver in less than three weeks.)

I really enjoy games --- you know this if you've known me for any period of time. I particularly like this game, in its many formats and its different types of skilltesting and its pushing my collector/accumulator/sorter buttons. I have strong mixed feelings about travel. I would have expected that I would not be about all of the travel required to play in big Magic tournaments very often. I... think I actually am? It's tricky, because the people I have to travel with are mostly acquaintances who I may like rather a lot but have no idea how to interact with --- they have very different social norms and expectations from me, and while we're on a team together, they've all been friends for a long time and they're all guys and probably it's as hard for them to figure out how to interact with me as it is for me with them. We're not close enough at this point that I'm invited to share rides or hotel rooms (I've offered, but been declined) --- so I'm mostly on my own for that. [0]

Something else I've noticed about this is that when I go and play or judge card game tournaments for a while I drop everything else on the floor because it is just less important. I send some <3 texts or IMs or something to my partners and might have a lazy conversation in the evening or something, but unlike most of my travel, I'm not staring at work email, I'm not trying to get a bunch of other things done, I am engaged and deeply focused in a way that is really rewarding and makes me want to do more of it. So even with all of the downsides I described up there I'm kind of tempted to structure my life to involve more going to these tournaments and trying to get better at this game, in combination with the Pokemon judging I already do (which is also increasing in intensity both in terms of how much of it I am doing and how much I am enjoying it/engaged by it). How bad of an idea is this?

(ps this is posted on Christmas morning because I had all but a couple of sentences done and I am waiting for a server install to finish, not because this is _particularly_ on my mind today, but because I am starting to stretch out for my end-of-year-email --- it's going to be a long one this year, y'all.)

[0] I do have the friend I keep trying to go to these events with, but we're obviously cursed as this time she had to say "I can't come play Magic because my mother is in a coma" (her mother is out of the coma now hooray!); I also have some friends locally who are totally down to come to one or two events a year with me but uh. I would use up my one or two events a year in a month at the pace I want to be going. :P

EDIT: HAVE PHONE WILL TRAVEL FUCK EVERYTHING SEE YOU AT ROAST <3

Lost my phone between the airport and Ruth's house. It's probably in the cab? I don't know where else it would be? I called the cab company and asked and they hung up on me, and I had someone text the phone with my email address and an offer of money. I think other than calling the cab company back tomorrow morning and hoping to get someone who's less of an asshole, that's about what I can do? It looks like there are other things I could have done if I had thought of this in advance?

I would really, really not like to get another phone right now.

I guess I should check outside and then go to sleep.

Edited to add: It rang a bunch, then twice it rung once or twice and then hung up, then it went back to ringing forever. Someone found it and silenced it. Whether they'll contact me or not, I don't know. :(

Hi all! Today I am leaving Seattle to go up to Vancouver for the Pokemon World Championships. I mostly won't be answering texts or my phone, since it will cost me money, though I'll try to keep people posted about how I'm doing. I'll post updates to Twitter (@raxvulpine) --- which I otherwise don't use --- and here when I can. The main reason to follow Twitter would be to see if I'm going to be in a featured match --- some matches will be streamed on www.twitch.tv/pokemon and if I know I'm going to get featured I will let people know. You can also see standings once the event starts Saturday at http://www.pokemonworldchampionships.com/2013/standings/ ; I am in the TCG, Masters Division.

I also got some positive press going into the event, being picked as part of a fantasy draft:


So that's pretty awesome, although pronouns argh. Expect a post about gender, Pokemon, and competitive gaming in general when I get back.

So first of all it is pretty great to start my mornings to wake up at 5:30ish, work for an hour, and then go take a one to two mile walk, and then go back to work. Like, seriously. This lifestyle, I like it, even though it is ludicrously wholesome; it is just too warm for extended walking in the afternoon when I am done with work at 2:30 or so. Well, technically, Rik and I went out a couple of times even though it was in the 90s and did long walks, but we brought a ton of water and also I was kinda zonked afterwards. A mile or two in the morning is refreshing and almost upwaking like a shower would be, which is pretty great. I don't know if I will be able to spare the time for this when I am in school again, but on the other hand going to school gives me structured exercise in the process of biking there, so probably it is okay? And I will still have weekends.

I just got back from Boston, where my schedule looked like this:

• Attend the first day of Steer Roast. (a party thrown by my old dorm every year, which does involve roasting a steer but I completely ignore that part; alums way older than me, as well as a lot of friends of mine from ten years ago, come back into town and we all hang out and it's awesome)
• Skip the second and third days of Steer Roast to work on final papers.
• Attend a conference for work, taking a training for advanced users of a software package I had never seen before; this was both really challenging and really rewarding, in that I mostly caught up enough to get a lot out of the training, even though there would be a lot more work to do if I were going to deploy this thing. But I have books, and a dev environment set up on my machine!
• Spend two days catching up on work, seeing a small fraction of the people I would have liked to see, and having an extremely pleasant Providence double-date with my girlfriend, her wife, and her wife's girlfriend, during which we concluded that the worldBoston is extremely small as we all knew all of the others' friends in like four different ways.
• Spend the greater part of the weekend bridesqueering [0], including both fun parties and a bunch of carrying stuff, and helping to make sure two of my dear friends wed without troubles.
• When I wasn't doing that, three(!!!) people drove in to see me from different states, which was pretty amazing. outstretched  even did my nails! [1]

Okay so that was the Boston trip. Now I have this whole summer stretching out in front of me where all I have to do is work my job. I have a bunch of things planned, of course, but none of them are for school, and that is amazing. (I'll be talking about school in a different post.) My plans include doing some art, meeting more people in Tucson by actually going to events and doing activities [2], traveling a bunch (another wedding, Anthrocon, Pokémon Nationals, seeing Rik, work might send me to Singapore?), continuing to groove on how awesome living with krinndnz  has been, reading books that are not assigned by a professor, and spending a lot of time out in the desert. This plan is, I argue, pretty awesome.

In a bunch of ways I am still kind of getting back into my own head after the debacle that was my year in Indiana. There were awesome things there --- I met some great people, I learned a lot of things, I feel like some aspects of my lifestyle changed for the better --- but between the breakup and the overwork and the comparative loneliness, I sort of worked my way out of my head to go live somewhere more nebulous, and that's not actually what I want. One of the things I'm trying to do both in my academic practice and in my practice of living is to take myself more seriously as part of the process of taking others more seriously. It's had really interesting effects on how I think about species, which obviously is part of my academic project but at least as importantly affects how I interact with myself on a day to day basis. I'm not quite sure how to express this yet other than it's good. But... it's good? It's good.

Any of y'all have exciting summer plans? :)

[0] Bridesqueering: Like being a bridesmaid, a bridesmatron, a bridesman, or a bridesmotherfucker, but with one's gender or marital status expressed as some combination of "none of the above" and "none of your business." Unrelated to bridequeering, where you try to get the bride to make out queerly at the bachelorette party.

[1] You can see an awful picture here. It looks better in person, but even in this photo you can tell it matches my color scheme, and color scheme trumps gender stereotypes for what I do with my appearance, so I will probably keep doing this.

[2] other than Pokémon ^^;;

Here is my weekend schedule for the rest of the year:

• OCT 7-9: saturday organizing pokemon tournament, sunday playing in one
• OCT 14-16: paper due, maybe a pokemon tournament if I have time
• OCT 21-23: visit Ruth! <3
• OCT 28-30: Rik in town! <3
• NOV 4-6: Rik still in town! <3 <3 <3
• NOV 11-13: either pokemon regionals in LA or maybe Anna visit? need to collapse this waveform --- or bonus secret plan! EDIT: Doing bonus secret plan
• NOV 18-20: currently empty, waffling about flying to Boston EDIT: doing homework
• NOV 25-27: in Wisconsin for thanksgiving
• DEC 2-4: work on final papers EDIT: and pkmncollectors meetup!
• DEC 9-11: probably not catgirl goth rave, work on last final paper if not done EDIT: Anna visiting!
• DEC 16-18: probably catgirl goth rave, need to pin this down EDIT: Catgirl Goth Rave for sure
• DEC 23-25: Christmas with Krinn's family
• DEC 30-JAN 1: no idea yet, tempted to come back home because I will have been in SF for so long EDIT: definitely coming back home, have to judge the Tucson Pokemon City Championships!

There will probably be some Pokemon city championships in there too, but of course those aren't scheduled yet because THAT WOULD BE HELPFUL. It's almost like they know that I will probably adjust my schedule to go and grumble about it no matter what they do. ;) ...I may, though, have too much of a life to be the very best like no one ever was.

EDIT: Bonus secret plan: NOV 11-13 also has a Pokemon Regional in Rhode Island. I could get everything except the seeing Anna step done if I did that. Hmmmmmm.

Not crossposted because of polls. CGR Six (holy wow) will almost certainly be in San Francisco this December; the question is which weekend.

After all of that, despite being on a later flight than I was supposed to be out of ORD and only because I tossed my sandals in my bag and sprinted barefoot through the airport, I caught the last third of the ceremony, had lunch with my family [0], and made it back to the airport in time to have my flight back to ORD be delayed, potentially jeopardizing my getting home on time, and... I don't even care that much. I did what I came here to do, and it was worth doing, and as far as I can tell the Rik-Zury-Nicole assemblage is proceeding apace and better in my absence in terms of housing-related stuff. So if I get in at a slightly stupider hour than planned? I will survive. I will not be thrilled, but I will survive.

Also yesterday in my nine-store errand run of doom, I retail therapied myself a new MacBook Air. So far here are my impressions:

• Transferring information from an older laptop over wifi takes foreeeeeeeeeeveeeeeeeeer. [1]
• The hardware is so fucking gorgeous. Oh man. I look at MacBook Pros now and think "how chunky and blah." The keyboard is wonderful and the screen resolution is high enough that I could turn up my font size on my main terminal window! That's really exciting, I promise.
• Lion... meh? They made Spaces less good (no more horiz/vert grid layout, harder to access, requires going into detailed documentation to find it at all), the iOS-style dashboards thing does not excite me, and you can't set a universal desktop pattern, you have to set it per space. Also you can't right-click the dock anymore to get the dock configuration widget and I realize that's really minor but it bothers me.
• The main reason I got this, other than "every two years I kind of want a new laptop," is that I spent two months of the last twelve living out of a single bag, and I suspected that the space in the bag and, to a lesser extent, the weight saved by using a smaller laptop would matter. I am not sure yet, but I suspect that it will be at least a little better, and maybe a significant improvement.
• ...plus I just like touching it
• The process of buying it was... very Apple, and not in a way I really liked. I wanted to walk up to a counter and say "Hi, I want to buy this laptop." Instead I had to touch an iPad and tell it I wanted someone to come help me, and wait for someone to come help me, and then he showed up and kept having to go back and forth to get things, and the credit card was declined at first (not Apple's fault), and you just sort of mill around buying things and then rather than taking the thing with you and setting it up, they want you to unbox it in front of them, and are all "You do the honors" as if you are unwrapping something truly special and not just the laptop you decided you wanted because the really good Vaios are like $2000. I found it really weird. I had considered ordering it online, but I would have had to pay taxes anyway (AZ's sales taxes are ridiculous, y'all are shitty libertarians, 9% sales tax and no public trash pickup?? What the hell are you spending the money on? [2]) and this meant I could take it with me on this trip. Which was super nice last night, because long battery life.

Relatedly I am soooooooooo tired. When this flight gets here --- they are claiming in 5 minutes or so and only being 5 or 10 minutes late --- I am getting on first, using my privilege frequent flyer status, and trying to fall asleep before it takes off.

[0] Well, I watched my family eat lunch. But that is what Rachels do at restaurants.

[1] Wait is it firefox that won't let me press-to-repeat anything but vowels, or OS X? whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

[2] Probably we spend it on racism. ;_;

Edited to try to make crosspost happen!

Rik and I went on an adventure today. The ostensible purpose for this adventure was to visit Smithville, IN, a town of maybe a thousand people around ten miles south of where I live in Bloomington. Why, you might ask, would I want to go to Smithville? Well, my favorite song by For Squirrels, one of my favorite bands, is called "Under Smithville" (link to song on YouTube with album cover as "video"), and I have no idea which Smithville it's about. [0] Since I started seeing signs for Smithville around where I lived I've been like "Oh my god I need to go under Smithville" but had never gotten around to it. Thus: To Smithville!

I looked it up online, and it's part of the Clear Creek Township, which has an amazing old but not old enough that it doesn't use javascript website with details about a commune in the township, the train that used to run there, and so on. I looked up a route to get to Smithville in general, confirmed there was a picture I could take a sign with, and then Rik and I purposefully got in the car without any directions and decided to see what we found. We first managed to get totally lost and find the end of a road to nowhere, and that was pretty fun, and then aftr some meandering through Bloomington's outskirts we made our way to Smithville and found a couple of churches labelled "Smithville" but no sign. We wandered around some more, and found the Baker's Junction Railroad Museum, [1] which seemed to be closed.

Then we found a school on the outskirts of Smithville, or possibly in it --- although the sign claimed it was Bloomington even though it was south of (thus, under) Smithville. It had a playground. So I laid down under it. (This is a reference to the lyrics from the song in question.) It turned out the playground also had a nature trail attached to it --- it was something like a mile or a mile and a half? Lots of really pretty vistas, butterflies that fluttered into the air with every step we took, fresh dew still on the grass... It was really nice, and not so long that the plant phobia really kicked in. Hooray! We also found the Smithville sign, and got pictures in front of it while people drove by and were like "Who in the hell does that?" Well, Rik and I do that, because we're awesome. Also I was staring into the sun so all of the pictures are terrible, but what can you do. [2]

Then we declared victory and went to the Owlery, a vegetarian restaurant in Bloomington, and had their coconut macadamia tofu, which is divine and nightshade free. There aren't a lot of things I can eat there, but the things I can eat are very tasty, and they're friendly and a reasonable price and almost everything on the menu is vegan or can be made vegan. Yaaaay!

In conclusion: An awesome adventure. And proof that I do actually do fun things sometimes!


[0] The band was from Florida, but most Google hits for "Smithville, FL" are either about some other state or examples that pick "Smithville, FL" as a fictional place. I'd like to imagine the latter is what they were thinking about in the song, but I really have no idea.

[1] Warning: Makes sounds if you don't disable JavaScript, and is incredibly baffling in a vaguely timecubey kind of way. I am simultaneously glad and sad that we did not get to see the museum; on the one hand oh my god this dude talks about shooting Communists and on the other hand he has bits of his website in favor of gender equity and marijuana legalization. All I can really tell is that he is intense and all of his opinions are turned up to 11. Or maybe 12.

[2] Also, this outfit is bossgoji 's fault. I am still figuring out if I like it or not! It's pretty awesome, but I can't decide if I'm comfortable looking quite this... feminine. Is that crazy?