Preparing for Midorifest

Although my schedule will probably be changing, here's a list of events I will be participating in for Midorifest this upcoming weekend.

Saturday April 18th:
10am Panel - How to Play Role Play Games

12-2p - Munchkin

2-5p - D20 Booth selling all the things!

5-8p RPG - New World of Darkness

9pm Panel - That's so Kawaii! Japanese Street Fashion

10pm - D20 meet and greet

11pm - Hunter the Vigil RPG

Sunday April 19th:
9-11am - D20 Table

12-2 - Zombie Dice!

1-6 Hunter the Vigil

COME SAY HELLO! I want people to play games with!

A word of warning

For all my author friends, I've mentioned my blog has been banned through Wordpress. While my author blog was perfectly fine, my book promotion blog, Yeah Books!, was terminated for violation of their terms of service. 

I read through Wordpress's terms of service and their user guidelines and saw nothing saying I'd done anything wrong. I contacted Wordpress about removing the ban and was basically told tough noogies. 

So I leave the blog banned and go about my merry way, only to find a few months later my USERNAME is blocked and I can't administer ANY of my sites. Now I'm extremely angry and I fire off another email to them asking to know WHY. After going rounds with them telling them I am unable to log in and that it is not, in fact, my domain name expiring that caused the problem. Repeatedly. Beat that dead horse some more... I finally get someone with a brain who tells me my login was disabled because of my book blog they had already banned. 

Can I get that back? None of my other sites are in violation of any rules I've read available on the Wordpress site. I figured with the book blog banned and shut down I was just stuck with it and would have to deal with it. Nope. Apparently I was supposed to delete a blog I didn't have the power to delete. Cue more angry on my end. I finally talk the Wordpress people into thawing my login, making the blog private so I can get interviews off there I otherwise wouldn't have been able to retrieve and moved all my posts elsewhere. 

Since I had someone's attention, I asked them specifically why my book blog was banned. They told me this, and I quote: 

"Your posts need to be unique and original. Content from book promotional companies, for blog tours, cover reveals, book blitzes, etc, are considered spam and are not welcome on WordPress.com.

Any of your own original interviews or reviews are welcome and encouraged."

But when I read the link in the link they gave me, the wording is really vague and I apparently DON'T "know what it is". The phrasing is this: 

"Spam or machine-generated content.
You know what this is, but in general, sites such as those primarily dedicated to drive traffic to third party sites, boost SEO, phish, spoof, or promote affiliate marketing aren’t cool. We don’t want you to pollute the web outside of WordPress.com either, so we ask you to please avoid sending unwanted or unsolicited promotions or emails about your site, even if it’s not on WordPress.com.
Bear in mind that these are just guidelines — interpretations are up to us."

Where exactly in this is the quoted policy? Where in this is the problem? I didn't have machine generated content. I hand posted everything on that blog. I formatted it myself. I call bullshit and I want to warn my fellow authors whom I know also promote books for their friends.

Here's a link to the guidelines, not that they're helpful at all:
http://en.support.wordpress.com/user-guidelines/

A LOT OF POSTS

I'm moving all of my Wordpress blog posts I want to keep over to this blog. I've posted SO MUCH today I finally tripped the "Prove you're not a robot" button to pop up. I'm worried this is going to make my life that much more difficult on Blogger.

So if you read this, Blogger Gods, I swear I'm not a spammer and I swear I'm not trying to overload anything or be a pain in the arse. I'm just trying to get the !*&# AWAY from Wordpress.

I've labeled most of my posts from the date they were originally posted on my other blogs. Hopefully I haven't spammed everyone. Maybe I should consider saving things as drafts and posting more tomorrow...

It got to the point of making me put in the captcha... and then it went to making me select photos. I think I've angered both the Blogger Gods AND the Captcha Gods.

Thankfully I'm done for tonight. Blog has been moved. We resume our normal programming after these messages.

Nowhere to Call Home

Apparently Wordpress has seen fit to end its contract with me after I'd purchased a web domain from them. My website is still visible, but I am unable to log in and use said blog. I am unable to update, unable to make changes, unable to download posts, files and pages...

I've moved my author blog here and I am in the process of finding out how to claim my domain name from whatever Wordpress has done with it. I will be moving my blog here even though I absolutely loved the premium theme I purchased on Wordpress.

I am furious beyond words that they say my website has somehow violated their terms of service. I'm an author. I'm not made of money. I have moved my book blog here because of a supposed violation of terms of service. And now here we are in the same boat. I don't want to have to pay for yet ANOTHER site and have a blog in two different places.

I am NOT happy.

All my old blog posts can still, for now, be seen at the following address: https://deaubreydigest.wordpress.com/

As long as Wordpress leaves it up, you can read all my tomfoolery. From here on out, all posts will be made on Blogger. :) Now the pesky business of transferring my domain name. I paid for the sucker... I want to use it.

News: Midori Fest

I will be attending MidoriFest this year and running Hunter the Vigil and perhaps Vampire the Requiem or a World of Darkness humans campaign. I might also be convinced to bring some Magic cards and play one v one when I’m not running games. Come visit!!

The event will be located at:

Shawnee State Park
4404 Ohio 125
West Portsmouth, OH 45663

The event runs from:

Saturday, April 18, 2015 at 10:00 AM

Sunday, April 19, 2015 at 2:00 PM (EDT)

http://midoricon.com/midorifest/index.php/programming

News: Marcon

I will be serving as one of three game heads for MARCON 50. We will be at the Hyatt convention center in Columbus, Ohio. When I’m not running games, I will be participating in panels and working game operations. If you’re into science fiction, fantasy, write either of those things or you want to come game with us, pick up a badge!

Columbus in Darkness will host a Live Action Role Play (LARP). We have an Amptguard team on staff who will be training us how to fight. (And you know I’ll be in the middle of that as long as Branden will have me.) We have tabletop games, we’ll have computer and system gaming and board games available all weekend.

The panels this year are really interesting. There are several writing oriented panels as well as gaming and general science fiction geekery. I had to severely limit myself on how many panels I wanted to participate in. There are panels I want to attend because I know absolutely nothing about the subject and I want to know more. And that’s not even talking about the presentations.

We have been hard at work putting together prize packs for the various tournaments. I don’t want to let too much slip, but there have been rumors of a super awesome giveaway by the Amptguard group and I also heard rumors of super awesome dice bags. Not to mention what I’m making and giving away. You all know I’m a massage therapist, right? I’ll just sit here and nod knowingly at you while you figure that one out.

We have an entire area specifically for children’s gaming and I will be running Faery’s Tale. Parents and children can play together in this tabletop RPG and I’m SUPER STOKED to play with you guys. Seriously stoked. I even made little prizes for the kids who play. And the parents. Because I would TOTALLY want one of these things. It doesn’t make a lot of noise and it’s pretty. And some of them are sparkly.

Plus there will be NASA things there. I can’t tell you what, but it’s super awesome!

The convention runs May 8th, 9th and 10th. I want to meet people!

http://www.marcon.org

Why I am a Feminist

As I was cruising through Twitter as I do instead of writing like I should be, I found a retweet from Chuck Wendig: HeforShe: Yes, I am a Feminist. His post is amazingly apt and I left a couple comments on his blog, but I thought it important to clean things up a bit and post it on my blog as well.

I just recently declared myself a feminist. Despite being a woman for thirty-six years, I only started calling myself a feminist in the twilight of 2014.

It took listening to other feminists speak for nearly two years via Twitter to convince me that not all feminists were man-hating, non-shaving, militant lesbians who wanted men to be ground under their boot. With feminists saying other feminists were faux-minists, it was the same kind of crap that led me to throw my hands up. Nobody is happy with the advancements made by other feminists, no matter how big or how small. Women are our competition. We tear each other down instead of build each other up. And it's bullshit.

It wasn't until I witnessed a conversation via twitter by the lovely Feminista Jones that I really took a look at why I'd resisted feminism for so many years. Her response to my rather spiteful comment was simply, "Nah." And she followed with a couple of tweets about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Apparently I wasn't the only one who wasn't a feminist because of all the shit other feminists have told us we have to be. And it forced me to  take a look at why I resisted being a feminist.

I was so leery to don the cape of feminism. Like many people, I was taught feminism was “Up with women! Down with men!” I saw many issues affecting men like the pressure to be the breadwinner and the “men don’t cry” rhetoric. My father was my best bud until I hit pre-teen years and then he just… disappeared. Because he didn’t feel, as a man, that he should be involved like he was in his daughter’s life. I watched male friends be beaten in parking lots for being “gay” or “girly”. Sensitive was thrown around like some kind of insult and still is. We have to walk around with these masks of perfection and invulnerability and it’s complete horseshit. I saw women with unshaven bodies and no makeup burning bras and American flags. I watched so called feminists tell men they were worth nothing more than genetic material donation. I saw women tearing down other women in the name of a cause that I now understand they knew NOTHING about. Until this year, feminism was a dirty word and still is in a lot of circles. I threw the baby out with the bath water because of horrible examples of humanity donning the title and ruining what feminism truly is.

I have never understood why women would chastise women for doing what is in their hearts to do. If a woman wants to become a stay at home mom and raise her kids, AWESOME. If that’s what works for her, then that’s what’s best for her and her family. Friends of mine in the workplace were coerced into coming back from maternity leave with the horrible sword of Damocles that they couldn't ever come back like their husbands were going to chain them to the house with a chain a'la Black Snake Moan. There is nothing wrong with being a career woman. If you want to be the breadwinner of the family, that's amazing! If your husband wants to be a stay at home dad? GREAT! I am not cut out for the role of domestic majesty. If I were left at home with my offspring, I might be the kind of mother to chew off their heads. My son's dad? He's a great dad. My son used to make mother's day cards for his dad and make father's day cards for me. Why? Because we didn't fit traditional roles and still don't and really never will.

It is important for men to speak up about being feminists so that other men don’t feel/think/believe/whatever that they’re alone or the only one or the single guy standing with the cheer squad while the football players and the band kids make fun of them. Every man who steps forward and says, “I’m not perfect, but I’m sure as hell trying and, damnit, this shitting on women and making men be some weird machismo stereotype is wrong!” is one more voice saying “No, dudebro. Not cool, man. Not cool.” when someone sells a shirt that says something as incredibly damaging as, “It’s not rape, it’s a snuggle with a struggle”. (Yes, unfortunately, that DID happen.) Men who are likely to assault women are more likely to listen to another man than to any women who dare be heard instead of merely prettily seen.

I've run into the women against women thing more times than I care to count. I get sick of my coworker saying things like, “I make decisions about people and if I don’t like them, they WON’T stay.” It’s like the thought never crossed her mind that diversity is a good thing and maybe SHE needed to open her mind a little. She’s STILL trying to figure me out. I’m a woman who rarely wears makeup, my hair is almost always in a ponytail. I don’t shave every day or sometimes even every week. I wear jeans and tank tops year round. I don’t give a damn about fashion or makeup or television. I don’t like rom coms like she does. Yet I wear Victoria’s Secret and support her in her decision to be a super girly girl who doesn't leave the house without makeup and who shaves every day, sometimes twice a day. We have a right to be who we are. All of us.

We all need to be excellent to each other. (Wow. Just dated myself there…)

Sometimes it feels like cheating to call myself a feminist, even for me as a woman. I don’t face the myriad of issues other women face. But, more importantly and more scary to a lot of people, is hearing a sexist joke and saying, “Not cool.” When you see a woman who is being street harassed, walking up and simply saying, “You okay, sis?” Putting yourself in the line of fire is a scary, scary thing. And anyone who is willing to take up that mantle, anyone willing to say there is an injustice? That’s a good thing. Male, female, transgender, inter-sex, gender fluid... whatever your orientation, whatever your gender... you want equality.

If not me, who? If not now, when? [transcript]

And, since I've talked about some heavy shit (and I love this girl for real): a moment of humor from the lovely Laci Green.