Days of Thankfulness Week One

Every November I participate in the Days of Thankfulness on FaceBook and Twitter. Here are my Days of Thankfulness for the first week of November:






Month of Thankfulness Day 1 I'm thankful for family

Month of Thankfulness Day 2 I'm thankful for no snow.







Month of Thankfulness Day 3 I'm thankful for modern transportation.

Month of Thankfulness Day 4: I'm glad I'm home.





Month of Thankfulness Day 5:
I am thankful for all the fun and kind people I've met through #GamerGate and the GamerGate Kitteh Patrol. (When people are fighting we swamp them with cute kitten pictures)

We are fighting against journalistic corruption and journalistic bullying. Is it surprising the pro-corruption journalist and pro-bullying bloggers have painted us as a hate
movement?

Month of Thankfulness Day 6: I am Thankful for co-workers who bring me soup. (Thanks Phil! I appreciate it)


Month of Thankfulness Day 7: I am Thankful for Virtual BlizzCon Tickets.  

On Sock Puppets, WoW, and Sam Biddle's Ass

My latest video, which has a very fierce picture! 

Sam Biddle's Ass (Semi Transcript)

Here are the notes I used for my Video titled "On Sock Puppets, WoW and Sam Biddle's Ass"

Hello and welcome to the sock puppet edition of This Garden of Thorns.

So, this week I had all my comments in articles on The Guardian.co.uk removed and was banned from a forum because I am a sock puppet and they can prove it. If you are unsure what a "sock puppet" is, it means I created a whole new online identity, just to further my online activism.

Nevermind that I've been using the same twitter account since April 2007. Never mind that I have used the same handle on Steam since 2010. Nevermind that I have been active on the Blizzard Websites with the same handle since 2006.

No. Because I chose to start a new blog and youtube account instead of attaching to my old cooking blog, I'm fake.

And there was other stuff, but the abuse from the people on the forums after I was kicked off was the worst.

But some good stuff also happened this weekend. I listened to a very imformative and fun stream on Friday hosted by Oliver Campbell and if you ever have 4 and a half hours to kill please give Threedog's #Gamergate News Radio Ep 4. a listen.

While I was listening to the stream I was able to get my Rogue in WoW up to Level 86, which may not seem like a big deal (I do have a couple of 90s), but it is a HUGE deal. 

My Rogue, Shadow was the first toon I ever created on my own account back in Vanilla WoW and I've had her since 2005 and only now have I got her to L86. So I'm averaging a little over 9 levels a year on her. Because I hate playing her. I said I wanted to do lots of damage and my friends convinced me to make a Night Elf Rogue, and I hated it. I hated all the sneaking around. So I made a Warrior, spec'd Fury and never looked back. (and speccing fury in Vanilla made me VERY unpopular) And seriously, if I can survive refusing to spec prot in Vanilla and BC, then I can survive anything the Anti-GamerGates want to throw at me. Raiders can be viscious about specs.

Also on the negative side this week Valley Wag editor Sam Biddle became twitter famous for tweets that seemed to advocate bullying during National Bullying Prevention Month: Such as "Ultimately GamerGate is reaffirming what we've known to be true for decades: nerds should be constantly shamed and degraded into submission.

He did apologize.

And then Deadspin editor Tommy Craggs replied to a memo from Jim Romenesko with this gem: But the memo and the apology - over what amounted to a few half assed jokes of the kind my site specializes in - seemed to cross some sort of editorial Rubicon. I don't think you believed a word of what you wrote, and I'm certain that Biddle didn't believe a word of his apology. And those tweets (meaning Biddle's tweets)DID get at the truth of what we've been trying to say about Gamergate: that it's an unserious and contemptible movement that deserves nothing more than half of Sam Biddle's ass. 

Which is how we all ended up talking about Sam Biddle's ass this weekend.

This weekend also brought us "Tweet Like Not Your Shield" and wow. I've never seen such a collection of racist hate speech in my life. I can't even begin to explain how much some of the tweets upset me. I've talked before about how I feel about people who try to silence me and remove my relevancy. These forces were out in streangth this weekend.

But GamerGate and NYS did have a champion in Liz who participated in a Pro vs Anti interview and showed herself to be an articulate, gracious, member of GamerGate. Her interview was very inspiring and postive and the oppositions interview was everything but. 

So, when one of the Literally Whos came out and said that all the women in Not Your Shield were afraid of the GamerGate men I had to step in and bring some love.

So, Gamergate and NotYourShield, I would like to end this week of bullying and hate speech with a message of love and support.

Please remember that we all deserve to live in a world where we aren't belittled by people for our choices of hobbies. We all deserve to live in a world where we are treated with dignity, even by those who disagree with us. We all deserve to have a gaming press, gaming bloggers, and gaming journalists who are ethical and treat us, their readers, their customers with respect.

And please remember that I love you, and together we can win this, not with hate, but with our love for our hobby and our friends.

 Stay on message and be kind.

And This Is Why I Love Him

I was really upset about being called a Sock Puppet yesterday.


Never mind that I've been using the Thornblossom Twitter account since April 2007.
Never mind that I have used the Thornblossom handle on Steam since 2010.
Never mind that I have been active on the Blizzard Websites with the Thornblossom  handle since 2006.

Never mind that the Companions of Xarth (whose banner I use for my YouTube picture) have been around since 2007 as a World of Warcraft Guild and 19-fucking-79 as a a D&D Group. (It's my husband's group. They decided to try playing WoW so made the guild, but they all preferred tabletop RPG and left. So I took the guild over and it's been active ever since. The D&D Group is also still active today.)


Anyway, I was upset.

And then my husband posted this:

And this is why I love him. 

Why I Identify As A Gamer

To paraphrase my favorite pirate movie: 

• Are you putting [writing] down that I'm a Gamer? Good! Because I am! I have sought pleasure and profit all my life in games without regard for any man's disapproval

I identify as a gamer because I've been playing games ever since I became aware of them. My gaming started with the Atari 2600. Frogger, PacMan, Space Invaders, Tank, Breakout. As I got older and bought my own consoles I was a Sega girl, but I did have a Game Boy for the times when I couldn't be near a TV set, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles was my game of Choice.

Then I got my first computer and I discovered Sid Meier. Pirates, Covert Action, Civilization. I lost whole weekends to these games. And then Warcraft: Orcs vs Humans. My love affair with Blizzard and Azaroth began.

So, yes, I'm a gamer because I love games. I love playing them. I love reading about them. I love talking about them. They are my hobby of choice and I'm proud to say I am a gamer.
I'd like to close with an update of a post I did in 2007 -

"Will You Regret Playing Games When You Are Old?"
What could I be doing instead of gaming? Let's see.... What did I do before?

I read. I painted. I designed quilts. I went out with friends. I watched television. I wrote poetry. I dabbled with computer games. I had a full life. 

Then, the person I considered to be my touch stone died and my life changed. 

On the days I worked I would wake up, force myself out of bed, take a shower, go to work, come home and collapse into bed until the next morning. 

On my days off I laid in bed and watched birds in the birdfeeders and birdbath all day, until the sun started to set and the fireflies came out. And then I would go to sleep. There were whole weekends where I didn't get out of bed. 

I went on anti-depressants. 

I went off anti-depressants.

I was a zombie.

This went on for months and months. 

Finally, one of my friends convinced me to try a new game called World of Warcraft. 

And... I started to wake up. I had something to look forward to every day. 

I started going out again with friends who also played WoW. I started taking classes and meeting people and having fun again. I started smiling more. I started being me again. 

So, no... I will never regret WoW. I will never regret The Sims. I will never regret Portal 2. They brought me back. I recognize myself again. 

What about you? Why do you identify as a gamer?

Hello World! I Guess I'm Picking Up From Where I Was in 2009

I was thinking of starting a new blog so I can articulate my thoughts on #NotYourShield and #GamerGate and I remembered I had a gaming blog from 2006-2009. I found an archive of the blog on The Most Beautiful Computer In The Whole Of The Known Universe (the computer I used from 2006 - 2011 and which is now hooked up to the TV for Netflix).

Here are my favorite quotes from that blog:

• I don't think anyone started treating me differently when they heard my voice. I do get a lot of "How old are you?" because I have a high squeaky voice and sound like a teenager. But, eventually everyone gets over that and we can get on with our questing.
  
  
• "A life of reaction is a life of slavery, intellectually and spiritually. One must fight for a life of action, not reaction." -Rita Mae Brown
  This quote explains why I prefer to play a Fury Warrior instead of a Prot warrior - I believe (right or wrong) that a Fury Warrior acts and a Prot Warrior reacts.
  
  
• And then there was the "Alton Brown" moment. I had fallen asleep on the couch watching TV and something roused me. I woke up just enough to see an Alton Brown commercial and I remember thinking I needed to attack him, but I couldn't tell if he was flagged or not.
  It took me a few minutes to realize that #1 - Alton Brown is not a member of the Horde and #2 - thank goodness I don't have combat reflexes because I would hate to have to buy Chris a new television.
  
  
•  I have interests in life other than gaming (honestly - I do!) . One of my lifelong passions has been poetry. I blame AA Milne.
  
  
•  I detest that book. I am so rabidly anti-that book that when asked for my opinion on the book I went on a rant that lasted several minutes (not days as some people like to exaggerate). The person I was ranting to made the comment that they hadn't seen me this worked up since Dawn was introduced on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (I would like to go on record that it wasn't Dawn's introduction. If you follow the Buffy example I haven't been this upset since my run in with David Fury. )
  
  
•  Today someone told me that gaming is not an interesting hobby because there are no 'real life consequences'. 
  Who are these people and why do they talk to me?