Shadow and Light
Posted: May 23, 2013 Filed under: deprogrammed | Tags: music Leave a comment »I recently posted a few songs to SoundCloud.
The first two are from my game Rock Bottom. Well, the second song is. We didn’t get around to including the first song. But if we do a sequel/expanded edition, it’s going in.
The second two are for my upcoming visual novel, Trigger. They’re not final product but are pretty much done.
Finally, here are two songs from my planned standalone album cyborg_heartbeat (mildly NSFW), release time uncertain.
Post-Post-Secondary Education in the Post-Affordable Era
Posted: May 22, 2013 Filed under: deprogrammed | Tags: college, education, poverty, school Leave a comment »
Original image by sd-stock.
My first foray into college did not end well. I knew my extreme poverty would pose a problem, but the common refrain in response to my situation was, “You don’t want to be stuck working at McDonalds, do you?” I heard it from friends, family members, and every mainstream media outlet. I caved to the pressure. I accumulated thousands of dollars of student loan debt—I’m sorry, thousands of dollars in student loan investment, as the loan sharks called it while cackling and rubbing their hands together with glee.
My college investment abruptly ended after the housing bubble burst. In the aftermath of the resulting financial crisis, which was caused by predatory lending to begin with, lenders tightened loan restrictions. I left school with a long history on the Dean’s List and no degree.
When I couldn’t find a job and could not afford my loan payments, the same sharks told me, “You should have thought about this before you signed up for loans.” Students are expected to predict the future. If we can’t discover—via clairvoyance apparently—epidemic levels of banking fraud? If we can’t predict a global economic meltdown? Then we are at fault. The same is true if we aren’t rich enough to afford lawyers to translate the fine print of loan agreements into human-speak. We are also to blame if we can’t afford a personal financial advisor to help us make the best decisions. (The school’s financial advisors, working at a for-profit college, were well-versed in getting stuents to sign up for loans at all costs. A federal lawsuit is now pending.) The Financial Predation Industry loves to blame its victims.
Amy Speaks: Running Away from Home
Posted: May 8, 2013 Filed under: recovery, updates Leave a comment »FACT: Rad background music always makes you feel cooler on your bike.
ALSO FACT: Vampires use vigorous jazz-hands.
Note: Discussion of dissociative identity, non-graphic mention of abuse.
Amy Talks Trangst, Porn, and Videogames with Black Dahlia Parton
Posted: May 1, 2013 Filed under: feminism, games, updates 1 Comment »Rather than join Gus Against Them at the May Day protests, Black Dahlia Parton invites Amy Dentata over to flesh out their plan to infiltrate the women’s struggle.*
*THIS IS WHAT RADFEMS ACTUALLY BELIEVE
Geeky Topics Discussed: Video game development, the accidental feminism of the new Judge Dredd movie, Amy plugs her new game Rock Bottom.
Social Justice Topics Discussed: The transsexual plot to sabotage the women’s movement, the myth of the universal girlhood experience, navigating oppressive humor.
Non Geeky Topics Discussed: BDP’s interest in doing porn, women’s experiences with depression, trans/trans relationships.
Black Dahlia Parton and I talk about gender, videogames, trangst, and have an awesome intense insightful time.
Rock Bottom has a new home on Newgrounds!
Posted: April 30, 2013 Filed under: games, updates Leave a comment »Dodge spikes, float sideways in mid-air, get annoyed at sand, and do other strange things to die HARDER and HARDER—the right way—in order to reach the top! How hard can you hit rock bottom?
Play Here
NOTE: Game content may be upsetting to some players for themes of metaphorical suicide/rebirth and death.
Dirty Dishes Inexplicably Reviewed
Posted: April 29, 2013 Filed under: games, updates Leave a comment »My one-day game Dirty Dishes, from the Kicked out of NASA Game Jam, has inexplicably been reviewed on Indie Impressions, and it’s more than I could ever ask for. Finally, someone who appreciates emergent dish breaking gameplay.
Nevada in Nevada: A Review
Posted: April 22, 2013 Filed under: fiction, trans 2 Comments »
If you’re white, somewhere in your late 20′s or early 30′s, and a feminist-inclined trans woman who discovered herself on the internet, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada will feel like The Voice of Our Generation. You will say to yourself, “This is amazing. It’s like I’m reading The Great American Novel, but for trans women like me.” You will then chastise yourself for buying into bullshit erasive monocultural concepts like “The Voice of Our Generation” and “The Great American Novel”. This will just amplify the effect.
I have a confession to make: I have never been punk rock. I grew up in a cush house in suburban Ohio with an acre yard. I was a trans girl trapped in sociopathic Normalsville, but it never drove me to drugs, to loud music, or to edgy acts of rebellion. Not that I conformed, either. I just disappeared into the cigarette-stained wallpaper as best I could.
It is this history that partly shapes the way I relate to Maria, the main character in Nevada. More accurately, it shapes the ways I don’t relate to her, yet still feel like I’m staring into a mirror when I read her excessive inner monologues.
My Gender Timeline
Posted: April 18, 2013 Filed under: trans 1 Comment »
Original photo by MarjoleinART-Stock
Note: This post briefly mentions rape. Also, throughout this piece I use certain terms interchangeably, like “gender” and “sex”. I tried to be more accurate at first, but then decided fuck it, our language sucks, I’m just going to use whatever feels right at the time. For a more detailed deconstruction of gender, sex, and the way I actually define myself, check out the piece Disowning Labels in my chapbook, Bite. TLDR; I don’t actually have a gender, and for me transition is about fixing body dysphoria. I wish I had better words to use in the title. /pedantry
Oh and sorry to those who arrived via Google. This post doesn’t contain a series of photos showing my progress through transition. You’ll have to look elsewhere for that. /unnecessaryapology
There are many trans narratives—the stories of how a person comes to know they are trans. There is no one single way we figure outselves out. Some know from early childhood, some figure it out later in life. Some transition from one binary gender to another. Some are one gender their whole life, just not the one people assigned to them. Some change their bodies, some don’t. It’s complicated.
The media, however, likes to portray a “standard narrative” of transness. The idea is that “real” transsexuals always know their gender from a very young age, always exhibit signs of being normative members of that gender, and later get “the operation” to join the ranks of the so-called “opposite” sex. My own narrative matches the mainstream one in a few superficial ways, but differs from it greatly in others.
Online Dating Encounters of the Cissexist Kind
Posted: April 14, 2013 Filed under: humor, sexuality, trans 1 Comment »I commented tonight on a wonderful post by SugarCunt, Online Dating Mistakes and 5 Steps to Avoid Them (which you should totally read by the way). My comment amounted to a post in itself, so I reproduced it here with some slight alterations.
1. Telling a Complete Stranger They are Attractive: A Primer
Most women who are beautiful in the conventionally-attractive sense already know this, because they receive comments and cat-calls all the time. Telling a conventionally-attractive woman she’s beautiful as a pickup line is like saying, “Hey girl, you’re five-foot-six and wearing a blue jacket.” Yes, this is a factual statement that is quite apparent. Nobody is impressed by pointing out the obvious.
If you want to compliment someone on their appearance, mention specifics. “Your hair is so gorgeous.” “You have a wonderfully intense look in your eyes in that photo.” “That is an amazing hat.” A generic “you’re beautiful” shows that you aren’t paying attention to the person. It’s the visual equivalent of messaging someone without reading their profile. It is a statement spoken at a person instead of with a person.
Pink vs Blue
Posted: April 12, 2013 Filed under: recovery | Tags: abuse survivor, child abuse, DID, dissociative identity, dissociative identity disorder, human trafficking, mental illness, prostitution, ptsd, rape, recovery, survivor 5 Comments »
original image by Moon-WillowStock
[Trigger warning: Non-graphic mention of child abuse and rape, multiplicity]
There are two parts of me that have been in a long drawn-out fight. I’ll call them Blue Girl and Pink Girl. They split and became separate people during a very tumultuous period in our life. The fight was fueled by a divide between parents, and a divide between misguided moral systems.
In one corner is Blue Girl. She tried her best to look normal to the outside world. She sought approval from the “non-abusers” in our life. She kept quiet. She disowned the parts of her that were sexual, that were inappropriate. Both the sexuality that she naturally had as a human being, and the acting out that arose specifically because of the abuse. She was called a goodie-two-shoes, and she was proud of it. She was constantly praised for being smart, creative, and well-behaved. None of her intelligence or creativity was for herself, though. She achieved things specifically for approval. To make up for everything she thought was wrong with her. She hid her femininity and tried to fit the boy mold, eventually becoming one of what we call the “boy fronters”—the put-on male facades that lived our day-to-day life.
In the other corner is Pink Girl, the one who reluctantly stayed with the abuser. She was brazenly sexual, didn’t care what other people thought, was loud and open about her feelings. Unabashedly feminine. She reluctantly stayed with the abuser because it was only in the space of the abuse that she was allowed to be a girl. She was shamed by others both for her femininity and for having any sexual thoughts or feelings whatsoever. She was labeled Bad. Because of how the allegedly “good” people in her life—the supposed “non-abusers”—judged her, she gave up on trying to be good and reveled in being “bad”. There was no way she could win, so she chose the route that allowed her to at least be honest about her feelings. She could be feminine. She could let out the confusing, overwhelming sexual feelings that resulted from the rape. She could find validation for her femaleness–albeit in really messed up ways, such as playing the role of spouse to the abuser. But it was validation. For all this, she became Devil Girl.
