01
May
2020

Branching off from Hexennacht: moving forward.

categories: personal; word count: 498 words

In case you need to know what Satanic Panic is: here
In case you need to know what Hexennacht is: here

One of the things that I wanted to take the time to touch on, as someone who gradually “came out” in her blog as a Satanist (affiliated with The Satanic Temple, at that), is that even though we may have, comparatively speaking, made strides toward being more safely and easily being able to declare our religious affiliations in some places — or lack thereof, depending on how you want to word them — it can still be dangerous to “out” yourself as a religion that is not the majority religion, especially under the Trump Administration (and especially if it becomes clear through whatever means that you are LBGT, or as I have sometimes worded it, “not an able-bodied, white-passing man”). Outing yourself as a Satanist is perhaps the diciest of all, and it can potentially have repercussions in child custody cases and job applications if it is revealed in the former or disclosed in the latter. One word of advice, though: you do not have to disclose your religious affiliation on a job application, even if the interviewer asks… and for them to “require” that is illegal.

However, plenty of divorced or separated parents — and I mean plenty — have fought over the most banal of religious issues as they pertain to their child or children, so for one parent to be outed as a Satanist, or volunteer the information that they are one, is pretty much analogous to throwing a hand grenade into the proceedings if you ask me… at least assuming that both parents are active participants in their children’s lives and are litigating with the intent to be able to have an equal say in the upbringing of said children’s lives. Sometimes it is actually court-ordered that one parent is to be the parent that has “final decision-making say” in the religious instruction of the children (or, conversely, if this becomes something that it is clear that the parents will never agree on, that both parents are forbidden from making their children “active, registered participants” in their religious denomination… which basically means that they can not baptize them or enroll them). However, for one parent to be the individual that is granted that final decision-making say is only generally done when the child (or children) have had a history of being brought up in that religion so that they can continue to be brought up in it to give them the continued regularity of that religion’s influence, especially when their lives will be shifted with the divorce or separation of their parents. Unless, of course, it’s Satanism. And then it’s, like I’ve said, like throwing a really judgmental hand grenade into the proceedings nearly all of the time because of nearly everyone’s misconceptions as to what Satanism entails.

And yet perhaps it is the most ironic of all that Satanists are generally the least judgmental and pushy.

30
Apr
2020

Why are there no good games to pre-order now?

categories: personal; word count: 177 words

I’ve pre-ordered everything that I want to pre-order Bub, especially for his birthday.

Looking for some games to “top off” what I’ve already pre-ordered, I can’t find anything additional to get him that he would like, which is just ironic. And in the interim, I’ve been blocked from posting or commenting to Facebook for a week (which technically started a few days ago) because someone weaponized Facebook’s reporting algorithm and had his friends report comments of mine because they did not like what I had to say during discussion on his Facebook wall. This is actually something that I do not like on Facebook, how it seems like Christian or Republican white men can “game” the algorithm to silence their dissidents, but you can never report them back for valid reasons. It bothers me that sometimes they can say the most profane, worst things, and “it is never a violation of Community Rules/Standards”, but I can simply call someone a stupid Christian man and that’s suddenly an automatic violation of the rule against “hate speech”. Alright.

28
Apr
2020

Why I chose to “retire” from the YuGiOh card game.

categories: card games; word count: 718 words

While I was getting my associate’s degree, Bub’s father taught me how to play the card game YuGiOh. Since he was as much into it as he was, I figured that there was no harm in learning how to play the game (and coming to collect the cards that I did), especially since as many of his friends played the game as they did. And for several years, I did like playing the game myself, even though we no longer have mutual friends and I came to befriend several other people that I could play the card game with and talk about it with whenever it did manage to come up in conversation — sure, it was never with the same… tenacity that they brought up card games and video games with, which was one of the many reasons that I was glad to have cut all contact with Bub’s father and his friends (because, as much as I like card games and video games, there is only so much conversating about them and playing them that I can do before I burn myself out on them, and as far as Bub’s father and his friends went, that was never respected because they wanted to do them more than I wanted to do them without a care in the world as to how much I actually wanted to do them myself).

However, two things stuck with me even after the relationship with Bub’s father ended.

One: that he loved YuGiOh more than his own son.

Truth be told, he loved a lot of things more than his own son. He probably loves everything more than his own son, which doesn’t bother me any more now that such a long time has passed. But if I had to choose just one thing that he loved more than his own son, it was, and it always would be, YuGiOh… that card game.

Two: that as the years had gone on, I found myself liking it less and less, almost exponentially.

Because of the first thing, I actually gave away all of the cards that he had given me over the course of our relationship to the younger sibling of a friend of mine whose Christmas I absolutely made, free of charge, no strings attached. It was apparently a couple hundred dollars worth of cards. To be completely honest, I just wanted to be rid of them because of that first point. These were the things that he would always love more than our own child, and I just wanted them to be gone. I no longer wanted to possess them, but I didn’t want to destroy them — I wanted them to be used by someone who would get a lot more mileage out of them, and as it turned out, the younger brother of a good friend of mine really wanted some new cards for Christmas, I happened to hear about this, and “he was in the right place at the right time” one afternoon.

And because of the second thing, which probably had (and has) a lot to do with the first thing, I just found myself not… liking the game enough as the years went on to the point that I no longer considered myself an “active player”. Although each of my sons have their own YuGiOh decks that I built for them on my own in the event that either of them ever get interested in the game, or even the franchise, I just felt like the time was right to “hang my hat up”, walk away from it, and “retire” from the game. I would never have learned how to play it were it not for Bub’s father as it were, and in a way, I considered “retiring from it” myself another way to cut ties. Part of me still thinks that he prays for me to “come back around” and want to convert to Catholicism, or… any of what he wants me to do. To me, this is just one more — small, but significant — way of permanently walking away from all of that. I’ve chosen to “retire” from the thing that he got me into. A lot of that is because of how much it means to him. I’m content with my decisions. All of them.

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