Name: Kyra
Tumblr Name: visions-and-revisions, although I’m 100indecisions most places.
Nickname(s): I…don’t have many? My parents sometimes called me Ky when I was younger (or even Ky-Ky, when I was much younger), and I’m Kyro to a certain circle of friends…Catherine called me Kyrinator for a while because a classmate in high school randomly called me that once…Moriel sort of counts, it’s more or less my Sindarin name, although it’s not exactly used much. Oh, and Bethany came up with Kyra Líadan, shortened to Kael, which cracked me up because Kael is the protagonist of the novel I was working on at the time.
Birthday: December 17 which yes, means that Jo’s birthday is my half-birthday and vice versa, which is bizarre because for years—starting long before I ever met her and even longer before I found out when her birthday was—I gave my characters my half-birthday as their birth date because, I don’t know, it was a slightly more subtle form of self-insertion.
Relationship Status: I have tons of boyfriends. Unfortunately they’re all fictional. Or they actually exist and they’re unattainable. (Zac Levi and Adam Young are the only people on my “no seriously we would legit be great together because we have tons of things in common, and also you’re adorable” list, and then there’s my giant crush on Tom Hiddleston, where I really have no idea if we have common interests in particular but he’s funny and sweet and articulate, which is a good place to start.)
Random fact about you: I have a lot of feelings about video games. Like. A lot. Some games specifically (Red Dead Redemption, of course, and also Portal and just about anything by Bioware), but also the medium in general because its storytelling (and worldbuilding!) potential and the way it fosters emergent narratives is endlessly fascinating to me and I just have a lot of feelings about this. They’re also very complicated feelings because I’m really pretty new to gaming fandom, I got into gaming and feminism concurrently, and gaming—some games themselves, and the fandom surrounding gaming in general—is still something of a misogynistic place. So there are lots of good feelings, and then there’s a lot of rage and frustration over that sort of thing, and then there’s slightly more general “this was an awesome concept and it could’ve been so cool and they made it STUPID” variety of rage and frustration. Because seriously the potential of games as a storytelling medium is practically limitless, and instead we get mostly sports games and more Call of Duty and Call of Duty clones and more Halo and Halo clones and unbelievably garbage (on every conceivable level) like Duke Nukem Forever. We get some good games! Some really good ones! And some that show how much potential the medium has and then just sort of fall flat! But Sturgeon’s Law is just as true in gaming as anywhere else, maybe more visibly so.
Also, I now own this shirt, which should tell you a lot about me in one go.
Hobbies/Interests: Gaming. Academic nerdery, even though I barely managed to get both my degrees (but have I mentioned often enough that I wrote my thesis on Twilight and rape culture?), because I guess I find a lot of things really fascinating from an academic sort of standpoint but I don’t like having to study them and write about them. Reading, especially sci-fi and fantasy. Writing, ditto, although at the moment the only things I’m making any progress on are fanfic. Procrastinating with Tumblr. Listening to music or singing pretty much all the time. Very amateur photography. Fandom, generally and specifically. Trying to make my brain work right (currently: adding Abilify to my existing prescription of Prozac seems to have helped a lot because my headspace has been surprisingly good lately…except it also has probably shot my sleep habits all to hell). Weirdly conservative feminism: I have only been a feminist for maybe a couple years and have considered myself one for an even shorter time, but although some of my beliefs have changed, I’ve always been staunchly pro-life…and that hasn’t changed at all. After a big Tumblr kerfuffle about it I don’t really talk about that online anymore for fear of getting my head bit off, but there you go.
Do you smoke/drink: Absolutely not to the first, functionally not to the second. I’ve had a few drinks but by “a few” I mean like…three, and the first two were sips just to taste. Some kind of pale ale I didn’t like, and then what I think was cranberry juice and vodka which tasted okay but burned and I decided it wasn’t worth it, and then a few swallows each of three kinds of cheap wine at Thanksgiving, and then I actually managed to finish my glass of wine at the Christmas party I attended with Calli. But I finished it more because I weirdly felt like I should and I was trying to force an acquired taste than because I actually liked it. I’ve been opposed to drinking for years because that’s how I grew up—my dad was and still is really anti-drinking, I think mostly because his dad was too, so I grew up assuming that Christians just didn’t drink, all alcohol was evil, and people who drank were bad or stupid or both, which…obviously there’s a lot of straw men in there. Eventually I got out into the world a little more and discovered that hey, good people drink, including plenty of Christians, and of course plenty of bad things are done under the influence of alcohol but plenty of bad things aren’t, and it’s all about being responsible and knowing your limits. I don’t know mine at all, since I haven’t really experimented enough to find out, and so far I haven’t really liked the taste of anything I’ve tried, but I’m not opposed to acquiring a taste for alcohol and drinking occasionally…I just probably wouldn’t much unless it really did wonders for my mental state or ability to sleep or something, because I am really cheap.
Of course, my daddy issues had a lot to do with my changing perspective on this too, because…well, when you’re essentially raised with the mindset that drinking, smoking, swearing, divorce, politically liberal views, and homosexuality are all rilly rilly bad and make you a bad person, and then the person who was always such a hardass about those things abruptly decides he wants a divorce and that’s totes okay now but the other things are still all rilly rilly bad, well…it makes you re-examine your values, even if the person you learned them from isn’t honest or self-aware enough to re-examine his. (No, but seriously, it’s like hey, divorce is totally okay now because he wants one, but the other stuff? All still terrible and awful. So basically you can do whatever you want but still be a good person as long as you call yourself a Christian and don’t drink, swear, smoke, or have sex outside of marriage. You know, because it’s not like there’s loads more to being a good person than that.)
Why Tumblr?: Because it’s like the 21st century equivalent of a commonplace book, the idea of which always interested me—for a long time I wanted to do that, but I never did because just the idea of handwriting down my favorite poems and quotes (putting in other stuff would be slightly easier, but only if it’s stuff from magazines or something) was exhausting. And then Tumblr came along and it was a revelation.
(via plenilune)
(Source: mstrueimage)
