This Beer Tastes Nerdy

Kind of a nifty thing.

I just found out that Sun King Brewery, a local brewer here in Indianapolis (who makes a delicious cream ale that is my go-to when I treat myself to a beer) is going to be making a new brew inspired by Gen Con for 2013's convention.

The nerds are also getting our own beer garden this year on Georgia St. - across the street from the Indianapolis Convention Center.

I am so looking forward to that. I am a big fan of our local Sun King. They have some really great flavors at decent prices (considering that it's not a massive nation-wide brewer). I have yet to run into their Beer Bus while it's operational, but it amuses me nonetheless that it exists.

Maybe it will encourage me to drink enough water this year so I don't suffer heat exhaustion like I did the year before last. That corset wasn't such a good idea...

Where Has the Time Gone?

Whoa, guys.

Just... whoa.

It's been a while. For those of you who follow me on tumblr (geeky-jez), you know that I have still been around online, but mostly in reblogging rather than generating my own content. I got swallowed up by my own life for the past year or so. Since our last visit:

• I finished my cosplay project, but had to cut it back to just finishing the helmet, due to getting flooded with more hours at work.
• I was promoted twice (with only a few weeks between promotions) into two full time positions and began managing my store.
• I got a second job as an artist working at an up and coming game development studio in town.
• I have had all of my free time sucked into staffing problems, training new people, dealing with some complete assholes, and getting generally depressed that my retail day job was taking me away from being able to do many of the things I love.

And then, in the first week of March:

• We found out that one family member is going through a cancer scare and had her roommates move out on her with no notice and without paying their last month's rent.
• Another family member collapsed, had to be rushed to the hospital, was showing signs of dementia, and had us panicking about his well being.
• A friend got beaten up by their partner (who is thankfully now an 'ex'.)
• I got a severe stomach flu that kept me from eating any proper food for a full week (and even then, it took me about a week after I could eat again to be able to not get nauseated by the smallest amount of food).
• I was still having to manage my store via phone while heavily medicated on drugs that made me either sleep or start slipping into a dreamy stupor of slowed mental ability any time I was forced to stay awake.
• I had a break down where I realized that I had to put in my two week's notice at work - not only to handle the possibility of having to leave town to help my family, but also because I feel I need to re-evaluate my priorities. Realize that I am the type of person who hates to give up in anything, even if I am miserable with stress, so walking away from a job is terrifying in it's own right.

All of which happened between Monday the 4th and Sunday the 10th.

March also brought us news of the attempted suicide of a friend. 

Understandably, I feel a bit overwhelmed.

It's scary to walk away from a job, but at the same time it feels oddly liberating. I am finally getting the opportunity to rediscover what I actually like to do with my time. It has only been a recent change (my time only became my own again on the 24th) - but the promise of having control over my day again is enticing. I hope to re-approach the commission work that I had to close down due to lack of time - and I hope to restart this aspect of my life from the perspective of a businesswoman as well as an artist. While the stability of having someone else hand me a paycheck is alluring, I also dream about being able to control my own fate more and overwhelm myself with work that I find stimulating and enjoyable.

I will put together that tutorial on the Skyrim helmet - which turned out to be freakin' awesome, if I do say so myself. And I will commit to being more diligent about pursuing my passions (even if I do have to wander back into a day job to pay the bills).

Allonzy- Alonzo!

12.03.06

I honestly don't know how I feel about this video.

Many times when I'm recording something, I jot down some thoughts ahead of time and I start to record as if it were a performance - the words are mine, the thoughts are mine, and I'm not stiffly reading from a script, but I try to stay brief and concise and animated. It makes it easier to edit and creates a better end product. To watch the raw footage, you'd often see me repeating myself frequently, going back to do another take of whatever point I'd last said, because I want to make sure it looked and sounded right.

This is not one of those videos.

Recording this kind of got away from me. I was not really in control. I started out with a vague sense that I wanted to talk about my feelings - that I needed to get something off of my chest. I had been looking back through footage of a deceased friend and was overcome with emotion while talking about it. I stopped thinking about the fact that I was making a video. I just started talking.

This is probably one of the most honest and intimate moments I've ever recorded... and that scares me a little.

I edited it, thinking I would cut a lot of it out. When the final cut was made, I wondered if I'd even post it. I posted it, not sure if I was going to promote it at all - maybe it could sit in obscurity in my Youtube channel and only the occasional stranger would notice it.

I've obviously changed my mind and decided to share it.

Still not sure how I feel about it, though.

10 Years Later

It's time to talk about something that's not fun. It's not amusing and it's not for entertainment. However, given the situation, I really feel like I need to write this down.

Today is the 10th of September, 2011. I don't need to tell you what event has it's 10 year anniversary tomorrow. For the past week, maybe longer, I have heard talk of 9/11 crop up in virtually every outlet I have for news. I won't lie; for the most part, I've been ignoring it. Part of me feels guilty about it, but part of me is completely jaded about the whole thing.

Me only months before 9/11.

Consider this: I was fourteen years and a few months old when it happened. I was old enough to understand the gravity of what was happening and yet young enough to have my formative years bombarded by the post-9/11 culture of the United States. I traveled A LOT as a kid (flying back and fourth between parents) and watched what had been a fairly enjoyable and exciting activity for me turn into one full of anxiety, suspicion, and high security. I grew up in a country where there was an intensified fear, suspicion and even hatred of the "other" - even though the terms that defined the "other" varied somewhat from time to time. People talk about how the United States came together after 9/11 and that is certainly true in the people to volenteered time, money and resources into helping their fellow man. But that's not the America I really ever got exposed to. I never saw any of that behavior (even though I know in retrospect it was happening throughout the nation). I watched the news very often as a teen, so I grew up with the stories of the latest threats and crimes, not the kindness in people's hearts. I felt the intense potential for coming together, like people desperately wanting to cling to each other into one giant national hug. But within months, that just seemed to slip away. The desire to feel some sort of resolution, to have something positive come out of the event, went unfulfilled for me. Instead, I just watched the country go back to the same in-fighting and pointing fingers that it has always done. To my young mind, it seemed that nothing had changed in the way we treated one another, just the way in which we wrapped ourselves in the flag and declared that those who disagreed with us must want to hurt America- be they our countrymen or not. I also had a family friend who is a close relative of John Walker Lindh... which, as you can probably imagine, gave me a fairly unique perspective on the "American Taliban" who was absolutely demonized into a two dimensional cartoon villain by most of the news reports I saw. (Note: I am not making a judgement here about what he did or the degree to which he deserved punishment, etc. I only bring it up because I grew up with a very real reminder that the "enemy" is a real human being and it's easy to forget that the real world is a very complicated place if you just listen to what you're told in the media.)

I couldn't help but feel jaded about the whole situation, as this anniversary approaches. I didn't want to hear news stories of people re-informing us about something that we haven't allowed ourselves to ever forget. Combine that with the fact that I thoroughly disagree with the direction our country has taken in reacting to the attacks, and I end up seeing 9/11 as just the beginning in a huge senseless tragedy.

And then I watched this absolutely stunning video about 9/11.

I think the simplicity of it is what really struck me. After all the talk about 9/11 and what it means, what changes it has or hasn't made in this country, the religious prejudice that has come out of it and whether or not it is justified, etc. etc. etc.

But to simply see it all again left me with no other option than to write this. It took me back to that morning, to waking up and going downstairs and seeing the second tower fall. It took me back to that feeling of absolute helplessness and confusion as I tried to process what had just happened, wanting desperately to watch the news but instead being shuffled off to school with no understanding of who or why or how, just that so many people had just died in a grotesque and completely random way. It took me back to being a young teen who realized that life is completely taken for granted: that I could have my life snuffed out in an instant and that it could have nothing to do with what I do with my life or how I choose to treat people. Being alive, I realized, was completely out of my control. Outside of suicide, living or dying was not something I could choose or control and I could be the most altruistic human being on Earth and still be killed in a completely random and senseless way. All those people had died, hadn't they? None of them had done anything to deserve it. Any ideas that I had about a world that was structured or purposefully fated was destroyed. Any faith that I tried to convince myself I had in anything beyond the great capacity for human goodness and evil pretty much vanished in the process of trying to understand and cope with what had happened. I will never not feel sorry, so intensely sorry, about those who died that day and the damage that was done. 9/11 is not something that is frequently on my mind, but I can't deny that it has had a huge effect on who I have become.

Photo from my trip to Ground Zero some years ago.

Deep breaths everyone. Thank you for letting me have that moment. I promise things will be more lighthearted shortly.

Unscheduled Detour

Just wanted to take a moment to say the following:

Life is hectic, stressful, and exhausting and can often feel like an endless list of things you need to do followed by an equally long list of obstacles - and it is wonderful, all the same. I think we often get so bogged down in our day to day struggles that we don't necessarily take the time to breathe and think about the good things that we have as opposed to the good things we want but can't yet acquire. Even simple things - like having a job, even if it is not the job that you want, or having a place of your own even if it's a little shabby around the edges.

It brings me back to something I was thinking about the other night - where I currently work, I get to do a lot of people watching and many of the people I see are tweens and young teenagers. I know that at that age, you never want to be told that you are still a child because it feels like it completely dismisses you as an intelligent being able to make your own decisions and rationalize about a situation. In simpler terms, it makes it sound like the adults around you think you're stupid. But many times, when adults tell you that you're still a child or that you shouldn't want to grow up too fast, it's not meant as an insult. It's simply because we can look back at ourselves at that age and recognize that we were not nearly as grown up as we thought we were - and we feel as if we can never go back to the way we felt as children. We can't go back to a time where we can lay out in the grass and feel the sun on our faces and not have to fight the urge to think about the bills we have to pay or the errands we have to run or that jerk in accounting.

I was always told that I was very mature for my age as a young teen (and to a certain extent, I agree). Even as I generally avoided the social dramas that seemed so important to many of my peers that I recognized as fleeting moments of overreaction, I still look back at myself in retrospect and think of how much I have changed in such a short amount of time. I wonder if I'll feel the same way in the next few years...

In any case, this was more of a free-flowing entry and is not really sticking to the theme of geekery, but I felt an urge to write it down. Even as I sit here, exhausted from a long day and thinking about all the work I'm going to have to do on my day off tomorrow, I'm glad that I can make a place in my mind to quietly think about the craziness of my life and how I would hate to miss a minute of it, good or bad.